Social Kitchen 2.0 Lab: Culinary Space/Kitchen Practicum (APA4259.01)

Yoko Inoue

Acquisition of food knowledge and cooking skills are important for personal and collective empowerment. In this Lab / Practicum, the students independently create their own ‘kitchen collective’ or form a collaborative group with class peers to organize participatory, socially engaged meals. By focusing on thematic discussions that each team agrees on to present at their dinner, the students explore possibilities for making an inclusive and equitable space where direct dialogue and face-to-face interaction around food and community can be facilitated with their guest participants including student peers, campus staff, and local food producers, practitioners, and/or activists. Through reciprocal exchange and skills sharing activities, communal kitchens can be reframed as vital, alternative social spaces to foster an inclusive learning. Topics include: cultural identity, recapturing place-based food ways, repairing and building relations between individuals in communities, labor, food source and the regional stability of food systems. The students are expected to be present and participate in collective food preparation, cooking and cleaning as many times as possible for them to learn the symbiosis of the “Social Kitchen.” The students are encouraged to consider cooking as a temporal, repetitive and contemplative practice. 

The students enrolled in this class are not responsible for the operation of the Student Center Kitchen for general public use.

This course is a co-requisite for APA 4258.01:Social Kitchen 2.0: Collective Wellness, Engagement, and Inclusion. Please be sure you register for APA 4258 via the add/drop form when add/drop opens on Monday, September 5.

The lab-related group activities will be supervised with the presence of the faculty or a staff member. There will be a weekly planning meeting scheduled on the mutually agreed day/time by the group.

In addition, the following weekend (four Saturdays) are mandatory for attendance: September 17, October 1, October 29 and November 19.

 


Learning Outcomes:
Collaborative endeavors and collective thinking
Inclusive placemaking
Peer-to-peer critique
Trial and error
Participation, civic responsibility and accountability



Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Prerequisites: Please e-mail Yoko Inoue (yinoue@bennington.edu) to provide a letter of intent for this course in order to receive permission.
Corequisites: APA 4258.01: Social Kitchen 2.0: Collective Wellness, Engagement, and Inclusion. Students who cannot register for the Social Kitchen 2.0: Collective Wellness, Engagement, and Inclusion should reach out to the faculty. Permission may be given based on the student’s experience, commitment and proposed ideas.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 2
TBA (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 12
Course Frequency: One time only

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