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The kids were wearing aprons over their jeans. When it wasn’t their turn to butcher, they gossiped and texted friends photos of the dead pig, which was splayed out on a jigsaw of white cutting boards, its head sitting nearby, gazing on; its eyelids had been sliced off during an inspection for parasites. On a counter, industrial plastic bins were marked: bellies, loin/chops, shoulders/roasts, hams, bones/trotters/hocks. The students took turns removing the pig’s feet and breaking the animal down into four “primals”: shoulder, loin, belly and ham. Then Davis stepped in to show them how to butcher it into the cuts they’d seen at the grocery store and the ones they hadn’t. She picked up a leg, peeling off the skin with her blade, removing the “H-bone,” and then turned it toward her students. “Instead of muscling through this,” she said, “I’m going to use the tip of my knife to feather through the fascia,” the pig’s connective tissue. Davis held the knife in a butcher’s grip and delicately separated the muscle groups to reveal a roast. “Now it’s your turn.”

Butchery is a new course being offered by the Oregon Episcopal School, an independent preparatory academy that prides itself on “inquiry-based learning.” Each year, the week before spring break, called Winterim, is reserved for experimental education projects. Some students go dog-sledding in Minnesota. Others play Dungeons Dragons or opt for an intensive course in the art of hat-making. Recently, an English teacher at the school, Kara Tambellini, read an article about the Portland Meat Collective and proposed a course on butchery.

And so Davis, who has taught butchery to mothers and young professionals, to beer brewers and bike messengers, but never to high schoolers, devised a weeklong curriculum that covered the basics. This included a field trip on a Friday, when she took the students to a local farm to meet and select a pig, whom they named Wilbur and then, realizing she was female, renamed Wilburess.

The next Monday morning, the class met up with Wilburess again at a local slaughterhouse, along with her 30-year-old owner, Bubba King, who had a thick brown beard and bounced a 5-month-old baby named Ulysses on his hip. When the recession hit, King explained, he borrowed some farmland — though he had no previous farm experience — to raise pigs. He learned how to butcher them on YouTube. Eventually, he got in touch with Davis, who, through the Meat Collective, gave him a formal lesson. Now her students buy his hogs for their butchery courses. King sells them for $3.25 per pound of hanging weight, which is how much an animal weighs after it has been slaughtered, gutted and drained of its blood. Wilburess, at 171 pounds, earned him $536 — he gave the students a discount.

In this farm-to-table era, community-supported-agriculture shares — in which families purchase farm goods through a weekly subscription — have become increasingly popular. Nowhere is that more true than in Portland, where people take their food ethics, among other things, very seriously. There is a sketch in the first episode of the IFC comedy “Portlandia” in which characters played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein persistently nudge their waitress for information about the chicken on the menu. After asking if the chicken was raised organically and about the size of its roaming area, they find out that the chicken was named Colin and that it grew up on a farm 30 miles outside Portland; later Armisen is handed the chicken’s citizenship papers. (The line between Portland and “Portlandia” often blurs; for example, Armisen gave the commencement address to Oregon Episcopal’s graduating class.)

Marnie Hanel is a journalist based in Portland, Ore. She contributes to The One-Page Magazine.