"Service Learning and Food Writing...
...in a Louisiana First-Year Composition Class."
Presented by Risa Gorelick
Risa Gorelick's podcast concerns service learning and writing. When she started graduate school, she was unfamiliar with service learning. A friend from Los Angeles was engaged in this, and when he presented at a conference in Louisiana, where Gorelick was studying, she came to realize that some of the work she was doing in her graduate program was actually a form of service learning. Later, Gorelick taught at an open admissions university in Louisiana where many students struggled with literacy issues, had never written a research paper, and were quite scared of the state-required research assignment that was part of the course. Gorelick describes herself in that situation as "a Yankee in the Deep South," which many of her students found entertaining. This led to exchanges in which the students questioned her about whether she had tried local foods such as alligator or crawfish. One exchange she remembers is when she was asked about a "crawfish boil." However, with the pronunciation of the students, Gorelick heard "ball" and thought of a dance at Mardi Gras. She had the students spell the word, and she attempted to correct the pronunciation. The students insisted on the pronunciation that was closer to "ball." Exchanges such as this were more than mere social fun. She turned it into a research project that involved the students researching and writing about their families' recipes.
These projects included interviews with family members, histories of the dishes, and connotations of the dishes. The individual projects led to a larger discussion of poverty and hunger in the community. The individual projects were combined into a class cookbook. A local printer volunteered to print several hundred copies, and the proceeds from the sales of the books went to a local soup kitchen. The project garnered community support, and showed the students the value of multiple intelligences. It takes a lot of knowledge, not necessarily textbook based knowledge, to create the recipes and work the farms needed for those materials. This gave the students more confidence in their own knowledge bases. The cookbooks eventually raised $1000 for the local soup kitchen. She feels the project really showed the students the importance of giving pack to the community. The students also had an opportunity to see that writing can involve real audiences beyond the instructor in a classroom. She ranks this project among her most successful in first-year composition classes.