Fostering Culinary Identities Through Education – Abandoning the Vacherin and embracing Phyllis’ Pavlova

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of two different approaches to contemporary culinary arts education. One pedagogy is the well-established master-apprentice approach to vocational education and the other is the design-led approach developed by the Food Design Institute at Otago Polytechnic (Dunedin, New Zealand). The paper uses the stories of two ficticious students navigating very different pedagogies. The paper is informed by reflexive ethnographic learning and teaching practices (Hegarty, 2011), which have been implemented through more than six years of delivery of Otago Polytechnic’s Bachelor of Culinary Arts, and by more than a decade of teaching in the master-apprentice model by one of the authors. The story-telling methodology - a methodology which has long been associated with the construction of meaningful knowledge in higher education (Alterio, 2008) - provides deep and significant insights into professional practice and the actions that inform and drive them (Alterio & McDrury, 2003). The characters below and the insights discussed are based on general observations of how students have engaged with the traditional master-apprentice and the more recent design-thinking pedagogies. They are not representative of any one student, rather they tell the story of the pedagogies themselves and not the characters portrayed. These are ‘symbolic characters’ that are contructed from observations of lived experiences so as to create a sense of reality and realism for the reader (Bochner & Ellis, 2016). As such, each persona has their own voice to create an emotional reality and to capture the complexities of their own situation and context (Alterio, 2002). Their primary function is to illustrate key differences in the two pedagogical models being discussed which are amplified (as well as exemplified) by the characters’ interactions with the pedagogies. The paper reads as a series of vignettes relating to a number of issues at play in both the traditional and design-thinking pedagogies of culinary arts education. Some of these issues relate to the explicit curriculum, while others are part of Apple’s (1982) notion of the ‘hidden