Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | L | Liberal Education

Cooking up a class: teaching and learning from an undivided self. (Perspectives).

Article Excerpt
AS THE NUMBER OF DIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS in American institutions of higher education continues to grow, it is imperative to diversify faculty. But as Pruitt-Logan and Gaff (1999) state, "We cannot diversify faculty quickly enough. We must reeducate the existing faculty to understand issues of difference and to be able to work with this difference. It is everyone's responsibility to do so." What follows is a story of how an ethnic studies course was conceptualized outside of the "discipline," how an interdisciplinary teaching workshop was crucial to its development, and how connecting "self" to professional development was the most important step.

Creating a course

Parker Palmer (1998, 15) refers to teaching from the "undivided self": "In the undivided self every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self. Such a self, inwardly integrated, is able to make the outward connections on which good teaching depends."

Creative power was unleashed while I was cooking my mother's recipe over eleven years ago and is still intense today. The story begins on a summer afternoon. That afternoon remains vivid in my memory. In the kitchen, with cool breeze and golden rays through the window, I stand at the stove cooking the main course for a dinner party that night for colleagues and friends from Albion College. The main course is stuffed eggplant, a recipe I had often eaten while growing up in New Orleans, but one I had never cooked before. It was my mother's recipe, the first of her recipes I tried to prepare since her death that winter. I remember trying to understand what her handwritten instructions on that small yellow page meant. I had to depend on my own interpretation since I could not call her on the phone to ask questions anymore. As the cooking progressed, familiar Creole smells were filling my Michigan kitchen. (1) I felt at a crossroads between my Louisiana past, and my future that was unfolding rapidly as I stood sti rring that pot.

Suddenly, just as Proust's famous experience of tasting the tea and madeleine put him in touch with childhood memories, the scents of the eggplant cooking reconnected me with my Louisiana heritage, merging past and present. I realized that I was literally at the beginning stages of designing a course on French Louisiana. Intuitively, I understood that this course would be very different from anything I ever taught, and I would tailor it to fulfill Albion College's new ethnicity requirement, a general education requirement in ethnic studies for all students.

As it turned out, this "opening up" of the curriculum provided me the chance to think about new ways of teaching and learning. Through designing and...