The Lit. Fest was Exciting Again This Year

I attended a session on October 7, 2014 based on a new graduate course at ODU: Lifespan, Communication, Geography and Food.

The purpose of the course is to explore how society talks about food from birth to adulthood, in relation to culture, health, race, class, gender, and place. During the presentation, snippets of an assignment called a “Childhood Food Autobiography” were shared by about ten student presenters  who  spent their childhood in places as vast as Bosnia, Puerto Rico, Serbia, Virginia, England, Mississippi, and Germany.  Most of the stories were engaging and informative. Each presenter’s slide contained a map and a picture of the food mentioned.  The picture here is of a woman from Capia, Philippines, who wrote about the Milk Fish Festival. She said when attending the festival, many dress in traditional garb like the outfit  she is wearing. Another young woman wrote about oranges and how they (and food in general) were rare when she lived in war-torn Bosnia.

As a teacher, I learned a great deal from this presentation, especially since the focus combines funds of knowledge, relevance, home/school connections, reading, and writing. The professor said the assignment stemmed from a fictionalized Marcel Proust who in his tome, Remembrance of Things Past (a 3,000-page novel), takes a bite of a Madeleine and ends recalling all of these events. Talk about mentor texts! Take a look at the passage from the novel and think in terms of how we might use it to spark writing in our own students: 

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses.

Exquisite. 

In COMM/GEOG 695, after students have written about a childhood memory involving food, they prepare the dish, and the rest of the class eats it as the writer reads his/her story. What a way to use reading and writing to begin to build community, understanding, and appreciation for others!