How MasterChef Helped Me Teach an Undergraduate Humanities Class
Last year as a Lecturer at UC Davis I had the good fortune to develop my own class titled “Asian American Performance.” My aim in constructing this course was to develop curriculum that students found both academically rigorous and personally engaging.
Thus, I took a risk!
Full disclosure, I am a huge MasterChef fan. Seeing Gordon Ramsay yelling at fumbling cooks is possibly my favorite genre of comedy. I also love the weekly challenge portion in which Gordon Ramsay forces his contestants to cook specialty dishes within a limited time-frame. I wondered if there was a way to incorporate such challenges within the framework of a college-level humanities class.
I developed a weekly creative component that tasked students with creating artistic assignments using everyday technological applications (such as Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook) that aimed to represent or illustrate the course themes. It was like a Mystery Box, using Dropbox.
The results were incredible! These weekly assignments were not only entertaining but often produced thought-provoking perspectives. Although at the time of the assignment the students would look on in horror (especially when I asked them to write a comedy sketch), I found that on each occasion when I thought I was throwing them a 20-minute crème brulee curve ball, the students would rise to the occasion and create poignant art. The class was not a competition, but since there was buy-in with all the students, I could sense that they did not want to be outdone by their peers. They weren’t competing for a quarter of a million dollars, just major humanities cred.
The students seemed to resonate with these assignments as they would often take initiative in conducting further research outside the confines of the classroom. I found that the creative component exercised their critical thinking skills in ways that traditional means of academic writing and reading do not accentuate. And most importantly, my facilitation of these weekly creative challenges made me feel like Gordon Ramsay (without all the coarse language). In fact, I would even pause dramatically before delivering my feedback. When students presented their work, I would always be astounded as to how students would convey their creative point of view through various genres/mediums.
Ultimately, I learned a lot about how my students think and they also gave me a glimpse into their cultural worldview. Rather than the superficial and unimaginative projects I feared, I was impressed to find that students took a page out of Ramsay’s book and “put themselves on the plate.”
To faculty: when creating undergraduate assignments, take risks! As an educator it affords you the chance to learn from your students!
Next time, I may actually have them bake me a cake.
