Author: Tammy Lane • First Posted: Thursday, April 15, 2010

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Chef Jeff Mayer led a two-hour cooking session for elementary art teachers. “Along with art is culture, and within culture is food,” said Mayer, co-owner of Saul Good Restaurant & Pub.

There were just enough cooks in the kitchen when art teachers gathered to explore ways to incorporate cultural recipes into their lessons.

“You can identify cultures through their food and their artwork,” said Barb Willett of Sandersville Elementary. “As we study other cultures, there’s a lot of diversity but also so many common threads.”  

Nearly 20 art teachers came together one recent afternoon for a two-hour workshop with a local chef to examine those links and gather fresh ideas to share with their students. Since food plays a central role in all cultures, the teachers were eager to see how they could weave that tangible, unifying element into their classes.

“Cooking is certainly an art, and it’s giving them a new spin on the art we already do in the classroom,” said Kate Christianson, the Fayette County Public Schools elementary art content specialist who set up the professional development session.

In the William Wells Brown Community Center kitchen, the teachers traded their pens and paint brushes for knives and cooking spoons as they prepared foods indigenous to the three cultures studied in core-content material.

“Along with art is culture, and within culture is food,” said Jeff Mayer, co-owner of Saul Good Restaurant & Pub.

The chef brought along ingredients for a “three sisters” Native American dish made with beans, corn and squash; Indian fry bread; Appalachian Brunswick stew; and West African jolloff rice with ground nut stew.

“Corn, wheat and rice are commonplace in just about every culture you can imagine,” Mayer noted when introducing the dishes.

The teachers quickly fanned out to several workstations to chop okra and carrots, peel hard-boiled eggs, slice red peppers and yams, mix the dough and brown the meat. The chef roamed among the small groups, offering advice here and there.

Mayer mentioned that many children today don’t think about where their food really comes from, so handling raw potatoes and corn fresh from the field is exciting.

Several teachers said they picked up valuable tips for supplementing classroom lessons that already expose students to cultural elements like music and dance.

“It makes me want to do more research to find simpler dishes that the kids can help prepare,” said Renee Jung-Kennedy, the art teacher at Cassidy Elementary.

Willett said these kinds of professional development sessions enable teachers to learn from each other as well as the expert or outside artist – in this case, a chef.

“It’s so hands-on and involves so many senses, and so does art,” she said of food preparation. “It’s problem-solving, it’s cooperative learning, and it ties everything in.”