The agriculture application activities allow for working within an agricultural space, whether a community or school garden, or another designated space for growing food. Each module can be completed within two hours and includes detailed background information and facilitation tips. While training in learner-centered pedagogy is recommended, and frequently provided for Cooperative Extension educators, these features allow for implementation with minimal experience. To accompany the curriculum, a guide for developing and maintaining an agricultural space was written and integrated into the introduction.Agriculture lessons were designed to feature the food system, including different agricultural systems, inputs, and innovations that have contributed to establishing current practices. Aspects of urban agriculture were also incorporated, which comprises smaller form farming in addition to community and school gardening. Agriculture applications for these lessons entail touring a local farm, or having a local producer visit the agricultural space to share information about their production and exploring inhabitants found in the agricultural space to investigate their impact on the growing environment. Another application involves working in the agricultural space with and without modern day equipment in order to understand how innovations within agriculture have shaped modern procedures. Home application activities include interviewing individuals with roles in the food supply chain, learning more about insects and animals that are involved in agriculture,maceta 40 litros growing produce at home, and mapping out one’s own neighborhood to assess food availability and access.

Nutrition lessons begin with practice categorizing foods into food groups, as defined by MyPlate, and then move to identifying macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients and assessing overlaps with the food groups. The other nutrition lessons include learning how to meal plan with the nutrients of concern for under consumption in adolescents and analyzing nutrition messages in media. Agriculture application activities for nutrition lessons involve planning a snack using items grown in the agricultural space, testing soil quality, establishing a compost pile, and making sustainable pesticides using household products. Home application activities include meal planning utilizing recommendations for MyPlate food group consumption and the nutrients of concern for under consumption. Additionally, home application activities entail assessing Nutrition Facts Labels on products found at home and analyzing a nutrition-related advertisement. The first cooking lesson focuses on food safety, including proper hand washing and setting up a safe work space. Each subsequent lesson and culinary application activity begin with a reminder to wash hands that is followed with verification of practicing food safety throughout the experience. Other cooking lessons entail advancing knife skills and practice utilizing basic cooking techniques and equipment. Meal planning in accordance to shopping in season and within budgetary constraints is featured in cooking lessons as well. Recipes provided within the curriculum are vegetarian to limit food safety concerns regarding temperature and to introduce adolescents to plant-based protein sources.Furthermore, all recipes were intentionally developed with low-cost ingredients, including canned and frozen products, and regularly available food items as to not limit low-income communities from preparing the dishes.

In addition to encouraging youth to make recipes, adapting as needed to meet family and cultural preferences, cooking home applications activities entail examining and avoiding potential food safety hazards at home. Additionally, home applications included meal planning utilizing seasonal produce and scaling recipes to feed their families. Teens CAN aims to improve food literacy, and consequently diet quality, of high school aged adolescents, with the ultimate intent to reduce and prevent obesity. Being food literate requires the skills and knowledge necessary to grow, buy, and cook food while considering health, so that empowered individuals can make the healthier choice when given the option. However, food literacy is a relatively emergent concept with accompanying limitations. While improvements in dietary outcomes have been observed in adolescent interventions aimed at improving attributes of food literacy, long-term implications for diet quality and obesity prevalence are lacking. Additionally, food literacy is a complex construct with multiple interrelated factors, making assessment of food literacy challenging. As such, a comprehensive evaluation tool is yet to be developed for this age group. Nevertheless, the potential of food literacy is worth exploring given that youth aware of food growing practices and regionality of produce are more likely to consume fruits and vegetables. Additionally, studies have shown that youth are more likely to consume healthier diets when they are involved in the food preparation process. This was observed during Teens CAN pilot testing as participants regularly harvested and sampled produce growing in their agricultural space. Furthermore, youth who were apprehensive to taste new foods at the beginning were open to trying included recipes by the end. The approach of Teens CAN includes three topic areas of agriculture, nutrition, and cooking with experiential and application lessons aimed at improving knowledge and skills related to healthy eating. Teens CAN is inexpensive to implement, requiring mostly printed materials provided within the curriculum and common school supplies. Additionally, recipes provided within the cooking lessons feature low-cost produce available year-round as well as shelf-stable items.

The curriculum employs activities and concepts that require critical thinking from participants,mobile vertical grow tables which adolescents are capable of completing. In addition to application activities that incorporate an agricultural space, each module includes home application activities to nurture further learning. These activities additionally provide opportunity for appropriate adaptions, such as those for cultural considerations, to make adoption of new practices more viable. Teens CAN was designed and tested following a similar approach to Discovering Healthy Choices for the Shaping Healthy Choices Program, which has similar theming and includes some food literacy components. The Shaping Healthy Choices Program has shown improvements in nutrition knowledge and weight status among other healthy behaviors. Similar agriculture concepts to that of Teens CAN, such as components of the food system and food security, were included in another curriculum, Sprouting Healthy Kids, designed for middle school students in Texas, that was found to improve participant fruit and vegetable intake. As Teens CAN is aimed at improving food literacy of high school-aged adolescents, findings from focus groups where adolescents ranked aspects of food literacy according to importance strongly influenced lesson concepts. Adolescents ranked food and nutrition knowledge among the most important aspects of food literacy for them to develop healthy eating patterns. Focus groups identified that adolescents did not pay attention to food labels or dietary guidance due to not understanding their application. With this, use of Nutrition Facts Labels and recognizing nutrients of concern, as identified within the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, were focused on in the Teens CAN nutrition lessons. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends consuming healthy eating patterns with adequate intake of essential nutrients through a varied diet that incorporates each food group. Though the curriculum was written to align with the 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, recommendations for adolescents did not substantially change with the newest edition. Food cards within nutrition lessons included foods typically considered unhealthy and high in empty calories since adolescents frequently consume these foods, as well as healthy alternatives to allow for comparison. Additionally, whole fruits, vegetables, and grains were heavily featured to encourage consumption as adolescents are well below meeting recommendations for these foods. With adolescence being a time of increased autonomy, all primary nutrition lessons and application activities were written to support adolescents planning for meeting their own nutritional needs. Furthermore, to tailor lessons to adolescents, all characters presented in lesson activities were high school-aged adolescents. Culinary skills education has been called to be incorporated into nutrition education for application of concepts through hands-on food preparation. While adolescents from the previously mentioned focus groups ranked food preparation skills as of low importance, other findings suggest that limited opportunities for hands-on food skills practice are a hindrance leading to low food literacy as young adults Due to this, primary learning concepts involved enhancement of food skills and opportunities to prepare food.

Adolescents also acknowledged that while budgeting and shopping for food were not immediately important in their current life stage, these concepts would be later in life. With this, budgeting and shopping for food was added as one of the cooking lesson concepts. Cooking programs provide an enjoyable experience that introduces youth to preparing and tasting dishes containing new, frequently healthier, foods. Culinary application activities in Teens CAN feature cultural cuisines, advise consumption of produce grown in the agricultural space, and allow opportunities for participants to have independence in ingredient selection. Participation in cooking programs also motivates youth to continue practicing learned food skills at home, which has been associated with more nutritious eating patterns. Adolescents who participate in food preparation at home are more likely to continue enjoying cooking and preparing healthier dishes as emerging adults. The application activities integrated in Teens CAN may indirectly improve adolescent health as community gardening experience was found to be positively associated with willingness to try fruits and vegetables in low-income high school students from an urban community. Additionally, participating in farm to school related activities has been associated with willingness to try fruits and vegetables in addition to improving nutrition knowledge and self-efficacy. Providing opportunities for involvement in agriculture, even if just through gardening, is important given that childhood, in combination with recent, gardening for first-year college students was found to be associated with higher fruit and vegetable consumption compared to those who have never gardened. Teens CAN lessons introduce adolescents to agriculture concepts and encourages growing food at home through application activities. This could perhaps establish a mechanism for adolescents to continue gardening into later adolescence and adulthood. Teens CAN has since been translated into Spanish. Having the curriculum available in Spanish helps reach more participants as almost 40% of the population in California is of Hispanic descent. This allows for the curriculum to be utilized for development of language education, such as district-level programs that encourage multilingualism. Additionally, the materials allow for adolescents to engage Spanish-speaking family members with the home application materials. Planned implementation of Teens CAN was designed to align with recommendations for older adolescent food literacy programs. For example, Teens CAN may be incorporated into classroom instruction, but was conceived with the intention of being employed within existing after school and youth development programs over twelve weeks. Each of the twelve modules feature experiential learning activities intended to cultivate teamwork, which is important for after school educational programs, and build knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy associated with food literacy. With Teens CAN primarily intended for low income adolescents, facilitating the curriculum within after school programs is particularly important for introducing youth to science-based programming applicable to daily living that they otherwise would not be permitted to access. Another recommendation for food literacy programming is to include peer-modeling. One reason for developing Teens CAN was to create a curriculum to be applied in training teen teachers. A study implementing the Shaping Healthy Choices Program curricula within 4-H found that teen teachers were inadequate at facilitating the curricula with satisfactory program fidelity. It was postulated that teen teachers required additional training, especially in regard to curricula content, before they could be competent facilitators.Following participation in Teen CAN lessons, it is anticipated that adolescents will have improvements in relevant knowledge and skills that will enable them to effectively facilitate food literacy programming with younger youth. Adolescents acting as teachers for younger youth, known as cross-age teaching, is a common practice within 4-H. Cross-age teaching can be beneficial for adolescents as it rein forces learning concepts for themselves in addition to building confidence in teaching. In contrast to tutoring, cross-age teaching involves specific training for the teen teachers who then facilitate lessons from a given curriculum over time to a group of younger youth. In particular, cooking education has been successful in a cross-age teaching model. Cross-age teaching perpetuates observational learning and can thus improve self-efficacy for various skills, including those valuable for food preparation. Additionally, these programs allow opportunities for team building and improve peer relationships while also encouraging implementation of cooking skills for younger youth at home. A long-term nutrition and gardening program utilizing teen teachers for elementary-aged youth provides an excellent example and highlights the scalability of a program of this nature. Applying this model employs adolescents that are culturally competent being from the same community and living within the same contexts as the younger youth they are teaching. Adolescents have been found to be as effective, if not more effective than adult educators.