Andrea Janelle Dickens
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
The first year of college offers ample opportunities for students to think about identity. Students are in a new school, and sometimes in a new city or country. They are meeting new people. This gives them the chance to think about who they are, and the essential elements of their identity. This assignment is a major unit in a course, a classroom project spanning several weeks in which students explore identity through food. It begins with students thinking about foods that are significant to them in some way: perhaps it is a food served at holidays, a dish a family member always made, a favorite snack, or a good-luck meal. Students produce a class-community multimodal project in which each student’s contribution consists of a recipe and two types of short (750 word) essays: a personal reflection and a cultural reflection based on the recipe they chose. Students simultaneously read essays about food that explore these two aspects. The first aspect is the cultural aspect; these essays explore the significance various foods, their preparation, implements, and serving have within culture. Some dishes the students choose are familiar ones they don’t see in the dining halls, like natto and rice for breakfast, or a couscous with meat and vegetables as a main dish. Some foods are associated with particular holidays, such as potato latkes served at Hanukkah or ma’amoul date cookies part of the celebration of Eid. Even though turkey can be bought year-round in the store, one rarely goes through the steps to roast a turkey with all the sides any time other than Thanksgiving. And even within the prescriptions for holiday meals, there is variation regionally or within families. For instance, my American students have lively discussions about what types of pies are served at a typical Thanksgiving dinner in their family (from my own upbringing, pecan pie and key lime pie must be on the table – all else is optional). The second aspect is the personal significance: what does this food mean to the student personally? What personal associations does it have? Perhaps the student remembers their mother and grandmother working side by side to make cookies to celebrate Eid. A student might associate the food with the typical rhythms of life back home, such as one student who wrote about the autumn family gathering at their ranch in Mexico when they would slaughter a pig and the multi-day process of preparation. Perhaps the student remembers their aunt always bringing the pies to Thanksgiving dinner, and always using pecans from the tree in her backyard. Perhaps the pie flavors were a source of disagreement in the family, and who brought them changed each year to make sure people got their favorite pie flavors at least occasionally. This project teaches students to begin with brainstorming: identify possible foods to write about. Students also need to consider what an audience may know about the dishes, ingredients, ways of preparation, and even the holidays or traditions involved and how this will influence their writing. Then students must explore the personal and cultural associations and write reflective essays with flexible structuring elements of about 750 words each. Finally, they will develop these pieces as a multimodal composition incorporating elements such as images, video, or audio. And they start to learn genre awareness by studying the format of recipe writing. By the end of the project, students will have created individual contributions, they will have worked together as a group to create the classroom multimodal cookbook, and they will have reflected on each other’s drafts. The linked elements in this project enhance student depth of discovery and the familiar topics aid in their comfort exploring identity. I originally designed this project with my L2 classrooms in mind. I have since used it with non-L2 first-year writing classrooms and have found that the food and identity conversations are more subtle and less overtly distinct, but students gain much of the same out of it as L2 students do. Food is familiar, and an easy topic to think about, but it can be a challenge to articulate in a new language and in a new cultural context. Learning to write about it allows L2 students a chance to find ways to articulate ideas about themselves and their home countries and cultures and how that shapes identity. And it gives classmates an opportunity to learn more about each other through what we share and what is different. Even among native speakers, regional, socioeconomic, and cultural variations allow for students to experience the same challenge of writing about the unfamiliar familiar that is food. I’ve found discussions in the rest of the semester are much more fluid and engaging once the students can relate to each other through having worked on the cookbook together.