This essay includes artifacts and workshop materials connected to the "Cooking with STS: Lived Experience as Intgredients" panel of the NSF STS as a Critical Pedagogy Workshop, summer 2021.
What’s cookin’ in your STS pedagogies? Let’s share recipes and make an STS cookbook together! In this panel, we invite you to reflect and imagine what alternative ways of relating, being, and figuring may emerge in our STS pedagogies when approached playfully through the metaphor of cooking. For critical pedagogues teaching to transgress, bell hooks (1994) reminded us that “we have to challenge and change the way everyone thinks about pedagogical process” (p. 144). Pedagogical processes, when trafficked through the dominant language of schooling, lesson objectives and plans, degree and curriculum requirements, assessment and evaluation rubrics etc., often prefigures a kind of banking model of learning that Paulo Freire (1970) critiqued and the neolibral educational institutions commodified. In order to be mindful about naturalized conventions and invisible assumptions ingrained into pedagogical lingo, our panel subverts this common language with the layered significance of cooking to approach STS teaching, learning, and pedagogical processes. With debt to Ruth Cowan, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and other scholarship enabled and practiced through gendered, classed, and racialized reproductive labor, our panel begins with us sharing our own pedagogical recipes and moves into a facilitated recipe making session for you to play with ingredients that you have laying around in your workspaces, fields, labs, neighborhoods and towns as kitchens to make a pedagogically nutritious and satisfying dish!