Cooking in the Practices Kitchen:Some Conceptual Recipes and Ruminations

TEA’s job  is to place a lot of ingredients in your Practices Kitchen. How about a buffet of ingredients: you select the ingredients--a pinch of this, a palm of that--and make a meal out of it--let’s call this a unit, call that a class. Let’s lift the students off the page, get them out of the text, and later place them back on the page—well fed.

• What are the realities and politics of teaching students to become political and active? What are the politics of creating a moral being?

• Forget the cookbook--the textbook--just for a while. Trust your instincts. What is giving your students joy?

• Teaching from scratch is extremely scary. But the results taste better, even when they don’t. 

• Prototyping is extremely imperfect, thankfully. These things always grow, just like sourdough starter, thankfully.

• Can a classroom experience have a 3D shape?

• Your classroom is dinner--how many courses are being offered?

• Student initiatives don’t have to end when the semester ends--they can be handed off from semester to semester, from student to student. 

• How can our teaching match the meaningfulness of life, the weight on these students’ shoulders, the bludgeoning of our beloved critical thinking to a bloody pulp, the liminal wild, death-life of Mother Earth?

• What is the difference between: a test and Action Learning? Between: eating while surfing the internet and an ant-invaded picnic?

• What is the special value of Action Learning  for our educationally traumatized students?

• When students create a game from scratch to illustrate some concept, they may end up giving each player $500 to start the game, while forgetting to create a way for players to spend it. Now the teaching starts.

• Students put on an all day conference to lobby for the creation of a Sustainability Center. The teacher was so busy trying to help organize the conference, “It never even occurred to me to see if they knew anything about what they were sharing at the conference. To my surprise they actually knew tons.”