"What's for dinner tonight?" "Chinese food."
What does the term "Chinese food" mean to you? Spend five minutes writing down a quick definition of this phrase, based on anything you have experienced or learned to date, including everything that you think it should encompass.
When the timer rings, exchange your definition with a classmate. Were there any similarities? Any differences?
In this course, we will be teaching, learning, and working together in ways that may be outside of the (takeout) box.
You will be asked to complete assignments that range from more traditional academic assignments--such as conducting primary source research in libraries and online, writing critical reading responses, editing and revising your writing, conducting peer reviews-- to more experimental and experiential assignments, including creating a webpage integrating original text and images, creating an audio file or short video, curating an online exhibit, and cooking a meal together.
This is all new for me too! I will be learning and experimenting alongside you, and occasionally showing you my own research developed for presentation online. At times no doubt all of you will be teaching me about what you have learned-- this is the goal, for students to become teachers.
The three major projects of this class will require that you use some of the tools of Adobe Creative Cloud. (If you are well-versed in a similar type of content creation software, feel free to use that.) Access is free to all UNC students, and it allows complete novices (like me!) to create cool webpages (like this!), audio tracks, videos, portfolios, etc.
here's what you will be asked to do:
Interview a Chinese restauranteur in North Carolina. Conduct an oral history. Create a textual/visual/audio narrative and present as a Spark webpage.
Conduct research to locate a historical Chinese cookbook. Write a critical analysis of its contents in the form of a museum catalog entry. Present as part of a collective online exhibit.
Introduce the characteristics of a specific Chinese regional cuisine to your classmates through a small group video which may include footage of designing a menu, shopping for ingredients, and cooking the selected dishes.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tUFFAONKp-2ZJrCn-sispcStiy_92Tk1?usp=sharing
Respond to weekly reading assignments in 500 word blog posts in small groups. The format will encourage a collective conversation on the reading even before entering the classroom.
How will I be graded on these assignments?
- In-class participation in discussion, peer review, attendance (5%)
- Reading posts, responses, paragraph development (20%)
- Regional cuisine presentation/video group project (20%)
- Group historical research / cookbook analysis and curation individual project (20%)
- Interview with Chinese restaurateur individual project (35%) [includes meeting several interim deadlines, including securing an interview target, draft of interview write-up, draft of Sparkpage, final product, author notes)
convivial and commensal, like a family THANKSGIVING dinner!
From Merriam-Webster: Convivial traces to "convivium," a Latin word meaning "banquet," and tends to suggest a mood of full-bellied joviality. Charles Dickens aptly captures that sense in his novel David Copperfield: "We had a beautiful little dinner. Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney-end of a loin of veal, roasted; fried sausage-meat; a partridge, and a pudding. There was wine, and there was strong ale.... Mr. Micawber was uncommonly convivial. I never saw him such good company. He made his face shine with the punch, so that it looked as if it had been varnished all over. He got cheerfully sentimental about the town, and proposed success to it."
From Merriam-Webster: Commensal types, be they human or beast, often "break bread" together. When they do, they are reflecting the etymology of commensal, which derives from the Latin prefix com-, meaning "with, together," jointly and the Latin adjective mensalis, meaning "of the table." In its earliest English uses, "commensal" referred to people who ate together, but around 1870, biologists started using it for organisms that have no use for a four-piece table setting. Since then, the scientific sense has almost completely displaced the dining one.
Some of the work will be completed on your own, but a lot of it will be done in groups. This is true to the spirit of a course on food-- with its convivial and commensal implications-- and especially true for a course on Chinese food!
how to reach me:
Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30-3:30pm, Hamilton 475 / Email: mtking@email.unc.edu
NOW IT'S YOUR TURN!
Credits:
Created with images by Krista Stucchio - "Chinatown Dim Sum" • padrinan - "chinese cookie dessert" • Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez - "Chinese food" • Khachik Simonian - "Sleepless Nights" • Fancycrave - "Closing a Momo" • mozlase__ - "still life school retro"