Teaching the Unruly Unessay
My students and I tested out unessays this semester, an assignment I now highly recommend.
All posts filed under: teaching
Teaching with Infographics
My students translated 1500-word essays into infographics. I share details for instructors interested to try a similar assignment.
On Teaching “Persuasive Influences in America” for the First Time
I reflect on what my students and I read, wrote, and learned in a course on persuasion in the U.S.
A Student Interview on Media Studies + Food Studies
I chatted with a first year TU student about researching and teaching in media studies and food studies.
Presenting My Students’ Final Project: Defining American Food
I’m pleased to share the restaurant reviews and interviews my Brown students wrote, working to define American food.
Asking “What is American food?” with My Students
In “Food in American Society and Culture,” we ask and work to answer the polemic, complex, and contradictory question, “How do we define American food and how does food define Americans?”
My Food Studies Students Designed Dietary Guidelines, Here’s What Happened
I wondered how students exposed to critical nutrition studies might view food advice differently and reimagine dietary guidelines. This is what happened.
Presenting My Students’ Final Project in Food + Gender
I’m thrilled to share my students’ final project, an e-journal that culminates our course, “Food and Gender in U.S. Popular Culture,” at Brown University. In this seminar-style course, twenty students (mostly in their first and second years of study) completed four main writing assignments — a cookbook analysis (which I blogged about here), a mini media exhibit, an interview profile, and a restaurant review — all of which engaged the themes of food and gender. For the final project, students worked to revise one of these assignments for inclusion in the class e-journal. We invite you to start with the About page to learn more about the class and our writing. As you will read, these writing assignments expect (and deliver!) clear and sophisticated argument, as well as what we called “compulsively readable” prose. Course readings included not only academic food studies texts, but also a full serving of food writing, providing a taste of different styles and formats. Throughout the semester, we aimed to craft not only compelling thesis statements, but also at least one “aspirational sentence” …
Teaching Food Studies, Cookbooks & Writing
How do cookbooks speak? What stories do they tell—and whose? What do cookbooks reveal about power and how it operates? How do cookbooks communicate and construct gender? These are some of the questions my students and I have pondered lately in our course “Food and Gender in U.S. Popular Culture” at Brown University. For our first assignment, students analyzed how cookbooks prescribe and transgress conventional gender roles. A uniquely interdisciplinary field, food studies scholarship often employs various methods, but the close reading of cookbooks is one method that approaches universality. Perhaps that’s part of why I’ve written on them so often (like here, here, and here). I’m working with a thoughtful and engaged group of 20 mostly first- and second-year students. While most had read and used cookbooks for cooking, few had previously considered them as elements of popular culture, as valuable historical evidence, as prescriptive literature that shape notions of gender, or as sources in which the so-often-silenced voices of women and people of color can be heard. In an effort to fully scaffold and support our work with cookbooks, we first did some reading. …
