Spicing up your teaching

Hello teaching world! My name is Jen and I’m a 5^th year PhD candidate at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and also a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center. I recently co-led The Adventurous TF: Teaching with Food and would like to share the idea more widely! With this post, I'll provide some reasons why teaching with food might be a good idea and share some examples from a range of disciplines.

 

Why teach with food?

There are many reasons why college-level educators might use food in the classroom. The reference list at the end of this post provides more information about the pedagogy of teaching with food. For our purposes, I'll share three key motivations:

Learning styles

Students retain course material better when content speaks to multiple learning modalities.  Here at the YTC, we often talk about different learning styles using the acronym VARK, which signifies learning preferences (i.e. visual, aural, read/write, and kinesthetic). Teaching with food brings the olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses to the classroom. In short, creating a multi-sensorial approach to learning is more than just a fun classroom exercise – it deepens students’ engagement with the course material. 

Personal connection

Connecting students’ personal experiences with course content is another way to peak their interest. Everyone eats, so all of your students have some level of personal connection to food. These experiences are a great starting point for exploring a variety of complex topics: labor, globalization, nostalgia, ethnic identity, gender, family, etc. In my sections of WGSS 120: Women, Food, and Culture, I ask each student to sign up for “food sharing,” where they are asked to give a 1-2 minute presentation. Students might present on a food that is important in their hometowns (e.g. lobster in a coastal Maine town), bring in a recipe that is important to them (on paper or as a dish to share with the class), or conduct a guided tasting (e.g. a particular ethnic food or childhood favorite).

Building community

Sharing food in the classroom can be a great way to build community and lower social barriers. Some teachers, including Risa Sodi (see below), notice that when their students are engaged in the act of food preparation, their defenses are lowered and conversation flourishes. 

How to use food in the classroom?

There are three primary ways to engage with food in the classroom: as a lens to explore diverse social and cultural issues, as a topic worthy of study in its own right, and as the physical material for academic inquiry and learning (Deutsch and Miller 2012).  I'll provide an example for each.

Food as lens 

  

Risa Sodi, a senior lecturer in the Italian Language and Literature department (and the Interim Associate Director here at the Yale Teaching Center) uses food as a lens for exploring Italian culture. She projects a list of flavors: 

Chocolate
Chocolate chip
Cookies and cream
Hazelnut
Lemon
Mint chocolate chip
Neopolitan
Pistachio
Rocky Road
Strawberry
Vanilla
Vanilla cream 
 

Risa then asks her students to identify the nine most popular American ice cream flavors and the seven most popular Italian gelato flavors. At the end of the exercise, Risa asks students to share which flavors they chose and to reflect on what sort of cultural assumptions their answers reflect. (You’ll have to stop by the YTC office to get the answers…) As part of their inquiry into Italian culture, Risa’s students actually get to prepare and eat authentic Italian dishes. To delve further, she asks her students to consider key food symbols of the Italian 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (e.g. menu ingredient, cocktail, kitchen object). 

Food as subject

During a section of WGSS 120 Women, Food, and Culture on food safety, we discussed the politics of pasteurization.  Retail sale of raw milk is legal in Connecticut, so I brought in milks ranging from the ultra-high pasteurized industrially aggregated milk to the hyper-local raw milk. I had three learning goals for my students: (1) to dissect packages for information related to food production, (2) to analyze imagery related to human-nature relationships, (2) to taste differences in a food product that is often thought to be a uniform commodity.

Food as material 

At the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Science, food becomes the material for scientific inquiry – one of the most talked about Harvard College courses Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter a public lecture series that you can access via iTunes or YouTube. Similarly, a whole world of chemistry lessons come to life through chocolate.  

For example, if you're teaching chemistry or materials science, you might have your students read an article about the materials science of chocolate -- the tempering process is a great way to talk about the relationship between time, temperature, and the resulting crystal structure. If the course had a lab component, you might have students try 3-4 different tempering rates. They could analyze the resulting crystal structure through materials characterization techniques, but just as importantly, you could instruct them to taste the results!

I hope these examples have provoked your own thoughts about how you might teach with food. Please share your ideas by commenting on this blog post!

Additional resources

Bender, D., R. Ankeny, et al. (2011). "Eating in Class: Gastronomy, Taste, Nutrition, and Teaching Food History." Radical History Review 2011(110): 197-216.

Bonnekessen, B. (2010). "Food is Good to Teach: An Exploration of the Cultural Meanings of Food." Food, Culture & Society 13(2): 279-295.

Desjardins, M. (2004). "Teaching about Religion with Food." Teaching Theology & Religion 7(3): 153-158.

Deutsch, J. and J. Miller (2012). Teaching with Food. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. J. M. Pilcher, Oxford University Press: 191-205.

Guthman, J. (2007). "Commentary on Teaching Food: Why I am Fed Up with Michael Pollan et al." Agriculture and Human Values 24(2): 254-261.

Johnson, D. M. (2007). "Teaching Anthropology Through Food." Southern Foodways and Culture: Local Considerations and Beyond.

Long, L. M. (2001). "Nourishing the Academic Imagination: The Use of Food in Teaching the Concept of Culture." Food and Foodways 9(3-4): 235-262.