Beyond the Thinking Used in Masterchef Australia: How Can I Promote Creative Solutions in Response to Design Problems?
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Christine Wintle 1 Beyond the thinking used in MasterChef Australia: How can I promote creative solutions in response to design problems? Christine Wintle Introduction Like my students in Home Economics, I was captivated by the television phenomenon that is MasterChef Australia. Millions of viewers watched amateur cooks demonstrate their culinary skills when competing for the title of Australia’s first MasterChef. This pervaded the classroom and provided a platform for discussion with students about how to create the perfect macaroon biscuit, how to identify the ingredients in an unfamiliar pasta sauce, and where to find equipment to create your own croquembouche. In the staff room over coffee, last night’s episode of MasterChef would dominate the conversation. The television series has been instrumental in getting more people interested in cooking, evidenced by increased enrolments in cooking classes both within my school and society, and the frequent use of ingredients and equipment by home cooks that were used by the chefs and contestants on the show. My colleagues and I used the concept of MasterChef to design a new subject for our Year 9 curriculum called [Insert Figure 1: Masterchef title with Learner plate exactly here], for those young cooking enthusiasts wanting to learn how to be a MasterChef. The draft proposal outlined a curriculum that transferred the structure from the series to a secondary school setting. Key concepts include sensory assessment, master classes, guest chefs to demonstrate specialised skills, mystery boxes and invention tests. The proposal was endorsed by the Director of Curriculum and the Head of Middle School and now affords us twelve months to write the course material. I feel fortunate to be given the opportunity to participate in the Stories of Learning Project because it will allow me to trial strategies and reflect on my practice when transforming the ideas used in MasterChef to an educational setting in preparation for the implementation of our new program in 2012. The area that I am most interested in exploring is Christine Wintle 2 the use of mystery boxes and invention tests to develop the creative solutions of students during food production. Through this research, I hope to unravel the question ‐ “How can I use a thinking routine to encourage creative solutions to a design problem?” The integrated use of technology is in the tool kit of many teachers who teach practical subjects: photography, textiles, art, ceramics, metalwork, woodwork to name a few. For me, the technology process is used extensively in my teaching to senior students in VCE Food and Technology (VCAA, 2010) and will use the design stage of the process to focus my writing for this article. The technology process is also embedded in the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VCAA, 2009) and I use it as part of teaching of Home Economics in Years 8‐10. I believe in all my students and what they can achieve. Through my passion for food, I hope to engage them in learning so that they gain new experiences and appreciate food as both a form of artistic expression and a science. The shift in my values has resulted in teaching for understanding and developing lifelong learners who are the ‘masters’ of their own learning ‐ not just masters in my classroom. I feel privileged to have been employed in two schools that promote thinking and learning. Tintern Schools gave me the opportunity to work with an educational consultant, Colleen Abbott, to help redesign our curriculum and make thinking skills more explicit. The learning culture at Methodist Ladies’ College further enriches my journey as a teacher and learner through exposure to ITHAKA conferences, the College project of Sharing Classrooms, biannual meetings with individual teaching staff to set their own professional learning plans and the Understanding by Design framework to develop courses and write meaningful curriculum. In teaching for the present and the future, I am mindful of the challenges. Students seek immediate gratification from their learning, and it takes considerable thought and expertise to hook and engage them when beginning a unit of work. Higher order thinking skills are becoming less developed, particularly in critical analysis that is needed when reflecting on the technology process. I see it as my role to demonstrate how to analyse information through the Christine Wintle 3 exploration of ideas and the structure of writing. Anecdotally, it seems that students are less prepared to explore creative ideas because of the immediate gratification that they seek and their fear of failure in exploring the unknown. Therefore, I need to consider how I can develop their creativity skills. How can I encourage students to take calculated risks? How is success measured on MasterChef Australia? Before I begin to further explore the notion of creativity, I thought it might be worthwhile to look at the attributes of the first two winners of MasterChef Australia that contributed to their success. I thought it might be possible to foster some of these qualities in my students so that the outcomes from the show are replicated in the classroom. Julie Goodwin was Australia’s first MasterChef and her book, Our Family Table, has become one of the biggest sellers in Australia. As noted by Margaret Fulton in the Foreword ‘Julie was happiest when cooking for family and friends but was keen to try new skills’ (Goodwin, J., 2010, Foreword). I vividly recall having a conversation with one of my students about Julie Goodwin having all the qualities of a good learner – she is enthusiastic, works hard at making her dishes taste good, has a flair for plating and presenting food in a professional way ‐ but most of all she learns from her successes and failures. Julie was taught the basics of cooking as a child by her mother and after leaving the family home, experimented with food by trying to recreate what she had tasted and enjoyed elsewhere. She observed the kinship that occurred naturally over a shared meal, stating ‘that if you make nice food for people, they love you’. (Goodwin, J., 2010, Introduction) Julie was certainly prepared to take risks as a learner and used her experiences to produce food of increasing quality. Towards the end of the program, she took pleasure in preparing food for the judges. Adam Liaw left the legal profession to participate in Series 2, where he became Australia’s second MasterChef. He is now working on opening his own restaurant in Surrey Hills between television appearances, and has just released a new book entitled Two Asian Kitchens. The Christine Wintle 4 purpose of his book is to understand old and new ways of Asian cooking, to explore how culture and identity meet on a plate. He recites a Confucian proverb that translates to “consider old things to understand new things. It’s the tension between understanding tradition and why things come to be and making that your own.” He advises that “you shouldn’t try to make food you don’t have a connection with” and indeed this could be interesting advice to pass onto my students. The competition gave him the opportunity to learn what food he did well and why he did it well through constantly having his food critiqued on an objective basis (Liaw, A., 2011). Masterchef clarified his thinking about how he approaches food, and I hope to do this with my students. How is creativity embedded in thinking? Hugh Mackay is a social researcher and ethicist, and in his book “What Makes Us Tick? The Ten Desires That Drive Us” he writes about how being creative makes for a better life. According to Mackay (Mackay, H., 2010, p11), when we’re creative: • We narrow our focus and distractions are shut out. • We are able to represent our thoughts (inner self) • Sometimes we don’t know where the idea comes from, it just emerges • Ritual and setting up structures that get you to commit are important. If, according to Mackay, being creative is one of the desires that drive us then how do we define it and what are the factors that promote its development? In its simplest form, being creative is the application of what students know to an unfamiliar situation. So a vegemite pizza might be considered creative for one of my international students, who would have little knowledge about Australian cuisine. Ron Ritchhart cites many instances of students who are creative in their everyday lives: ‘wherever it is important to think of new ways of doing things, to look at things through new eyes, to go beyond conventional ways of thinking, to stretch beyond the obvious’. (www.pz.harvard.edu, accessed 14.5.2011) For me, it is the student who is able to go beyond conventional ways of thinking that stands her apart from the rest of the class. To paraphrase Ritchhart, you can view creativity as the big C and the little c. For the international Christine Wintle 5 student who is impressed by her effort to create a vegemite pizza, the creativity is relative to her experiences (little c). If we shift the creation of the vegemite pizza to the larger community (the big C), then it may not be viewed as creative. Everyone has their own food experiences and has an opinion about the way food tastes and how it is presented. It therefore becomes a challenge for students to work with an ingredient they may not be familiar with, to try an unusual preparation or cooking technique or change the form in which food is traditionally presented. Creativity is embedded in thinking and it is impossible for the learner to ‘know everything.’ The development of inspirational ideas requires time to research and experiment with new thoughts to bring them to fruition.