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.

It’s never too early to start planning an effective review session!

As the end of the spring term is only a few weeks away, now is a great time to start preparing final exam review sessions!  After all, it is not only your students that have to revisit all of that content that has been covered in the past few months.  Though this task can seem daunting there are ways to streamline your prep for review sessions.  In this blog post, you will find some tips for preparing and running review sessions that will be rewarding for both you and your students. 

Gather information about the exam

Know where, when and how long the final exam will be.  Be sure that you have an idea of the content that will be covered and the format of the exam.  Being familiar with the themes covered in the exam will provide a scaffold around which to structure your review session.  The idea is not to give students hints about specific exam questions but to frame a review session around material that the students will need to know.

Gather information about your students

Your students’ past performances on midterms or problem sets will reveal what topics will need to be covered in more depth during the review session.  Make sure to have an idea of the students’ schedule when you are choosing a time for the review session.  Be aware of when classes end, what the reading days are and the exam date.  You want to time the review session in a way that students will have already begun studying, but will still have time to address any areas of weakness they might become aware of in the review session.  If you wish to make an effort to get as many students to attend the review session as possible, I would recommend trying a user-friendly free online tool found at www.doodle.com that makes scheduling easier!

Make sure you master the material

Given your role in the course, you are expected to have a good grasp of the content.  This can cause you to feel quite a bit of pressure.  To alleviate some of this, put the burden back on your students and require that they e-mail you questions before the review session.  Though you should still be familiar with the course material that students do not specifically ask about, this exercise will help to orient you to the topics that may be the most discussed during the review session. 

Have a plan for the review session-and stick to it!

Make an outline for what you plan to cover in the review session.  Prepare some sample questions and answers that you can use during the review session or give to your students for use when they are studying.  Using sample answers provides a great chance to demonstrate what constitutes a good answer.  This will serve as an example of what you will be looking for when you are grading their exams.  Let your students know what to expect before coming to the review session so that they are able to prepare.  There are many options for the format of the review session.  Rather than using only a lecture format to cover the material, it can be fun to try some alternative styles.  A few examples are: a question and answer session, making a group outline on the board, playing a game of Jeopardy that covers all the themes on the exam, working through practice problems and giving an overview presentation on how the topics of the course relate to each other.  Feel free to try different things in the review session and find what works for you!

 

It is important to remember that exam time, though stressful for teachers, is also a major source of angst for your students.  Being nervous around exam time can be helpful for students and provide an extra source of adrenaline, but if students become too stressed this heightened state can become an impediment to their performance. To help with stress management encourage students to adequately prepare for the exam, recognize what they DO know about the content and take care of themselves by eating well and sleeping enough.  Be aware of resources offered through the counseling center for extreme cases of stress. 

Hopefully these tips on running review sessions have alleviated some of the anxiety you might feel about preparing a review session

Teaching outside your expertise? Don't worry...

Teaching outside your area of expertise can be daunting but is a reality in academia today. Even when teaching courses about subjects you know well, there will always be some topics you are more comfortable with relative to others. Non-experts do bring strengths to the classroom: when teaching a less familiar subject, you're more likely to have realistic expectations of your students, and you'll tend to focus on concrete explanations of problems and phenomena. As with any teaching assignment, though, you will want to manage your time, plan course content, and be respected by the students - all things we have a few suggestions for here.

What's important? Planning the course

• Look for a few syllabi (online or elsewhere) for a similar course
• Talk to at least one expert in the field to learn about important themes as well as common misconceptions
• Start with a topic that you are more familiar with
• Employ active learning techniques to engage students and encourage them to take responsibility for their own learning
• Build flexibility into the syllabus

Establishing credibility

• Introduce yourself, including your background, work experience, and degrees
• Arrive on time or a little early
• Dress professionally
• Be clear about expectations and due dates
• Remind students about upcoming due dates, exams, and other events
• If something needs to be changed or rescheduled, ask for student preferences and feedback
• Prepare to explain confusing or difficult topics clearly and in more than one way
• Do all of the course reading in advance, and be familiar with it
• Learn how to field questions appropriately, and have ways of saying "I don't know the answer"

Managing your time

• Reframe your role in the classroom so you don't feel that you hold the "key" to all the knowledge
• Reuse quality material developed for the same course in the past
• Transfer relevant material from previous courses you've taught
• Familiarize yourself with course readings before the course and then before each class
• Stagger due dates and do not plan too many assessments
• Aim for quality instead of quantity

Try to avoid

• Underestimating the amount of time it takes to prepare
• Assigning too much work and too many assignments
• Over-preparing

These are just a few suggestions and techniques that may be helpful when you are teaching material that you're less familiar with. Keep in mind that, as a non-expert, you have strengths that you can use to your advantage. Furthermore, teaching outside your expertise can broaden your knowledge base, lead to new and interesting areas of research, connect you with faculty and colleagues in other departments and institutions, and enhance your C.V.  Let us know how it goes!

Source: Huston, Therese. Teaching What You Don't Know. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. Print.

Course Design Resources

By Erica De Bruin and Mercedes Bravo

Preparing to teach your own course for the first time? Here's a round-up of some of our favorite course design resources on the web: 

The teaching centers at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and Vanderbilt have put together particularly comprehensive online guides, which take you from identifying situational constraints and developing course goals to writing the syllabus. If you are thinking of revising an existing course, reading about the experiences of other faculty (PDF) members might be a great place to start. 

"Integrated Course Design" (PDF), a paper by L. Dee Fink of the University of Oklahoma, discusses how to integrate course design so that your learning goals, instructional strategies, and assessments are well-aligned. For an illustration of how you might vary your instructional strategies, see: "Scientific Teaching in Practice." (For those of you that attended the Yale Teaching Center's recent workshop on course design, these papers were the source of the graphics we showed illustrating how to vary your instructional strategies.)

The University of Minnesota has a helpful tutorial that walks you through the process of designing a syllabus. Other great syllabus design guides have been put together by the teaching centers at Brown (PDF), Cornell, and Michigan. For sample syllabi, one website to check out is OpenCourseWareSearch, which compiles course materials from several universities with open courses including MIT, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Yale.

If you've found any additional resources, please leave them in the comments!