Interview: Dinah Mack, Education Program Manager at Massachusetts Farm to School, speaks with Educator Jessica Lander about the Tasting History Project.

Introduction

When you think of a family recipe, what memories does it conjure up? Can you imagine a setting? The people involved? The specific flavors? Jessica Lander, a U.S. history teacher at Lowell High School, teaches recent immigrant and refugee students from more than 30 different countries and asks her students to explore these questions in the Tasting History project, which comes at the tail end of an in depth study of US immigration. Lander wanted to create a project that would center and celebrate her students immigration stories as a part of America's long history of immigration. Inspired by her own 7th grade history teacher, Lander adapted the project to fit the needs for her own students. For the unit project, each student chooses a favorite family recipe and interviews their family members to get the recipe and story about the dish. The students then translate the recipe in a way that allows for other people to cook the dish. They also share a memory of the food and tell a story about their migration to the United States. At the end of the project, the class celebrates with a multicultural feast and Lander publishes a cookbook called Tasting History that is available to the community. The project is so inspiring to the community that the Lowell Food Service team reached out and started a collaboration to feature the student recipes in the school cafeteria. The project started in 2018 and is now in its 5th edition. In this interview, Lander shares the process and meaning of this unit so that others may adapt it for their own classrooms and their own students. Welcome Jessica Lanter to this interview. 

Jessica: My name is Jessica Lander. I am a high school history and civics teacher in Lowell, MA Lowell High School, and I have the honor of working with recent immigrant and refugee students from 30 different countries, from Columbia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Cambodia. 

Your classroom itself is really diverse. How does that diversity play out in your whole school community? 

Jessica: So we have a very vibrant community, students from I think upwards of 50 countries. I think about one in four, one in five is recent immigrant origin is part of the EL program or recently part of the EL program. And again, as I said, my students come from about 30 different countries and we have students who have arrived, I mean as recently as like 3 weeks ago. And Lowell has always been in its history, a city that has been a home to peoples from all around the world. 

And can you introduce us all to the Tasting History Project? When did the tasting history project start? Why did you start it? What inspired you? And was there a need that you recognized at your school? 

Jessica: Absolutely. The Tasting History Project, the idea for it, came as I was building out our curriculum for studying immigration. We start off the year in my class in U.S. history studying immigration in the early 1900s, and we're studying Emma Lazarus poem at the basin Statue of Liberty, and we're reading the poems written by hopeful Chinese immigrants in Angel Island who have been detained at Angel Island, and we are studying and discussing laws that were welcoming and laws that tried to exclude immigrants and thinking about a project to cap off this study. And a lot of the lesson plans when you look at lesson plans online, on books about teaching immigration in the early 1900s ask students, “So imagine if you were moving to another country, what would you bring with you? What would it be like?” and of course my students don't have to imagine because my students are experts and so wanting to create a project that really tapped into their strengths and expertise as being immigrants, and two, because if we're studying, if we're studying the history of immigration the in the US it is important not only to study the history of immigration 100 years ago, but also to study my students stories. They're part of our study and they're just as important to study and it centers too the importance of my students as teachers in our classroom, and as teachers in our communities. The idea of the cookbook specifically came from actually my 7th and 8th grade teacher who had a version of this project for her students who are not recent immigrants and refugee students, but they did a cookbook project. I didn't do it in her class, it was actually after I left her class, but I've still stayed in really close contact with my 7th grade teacher and she still shares lessons with me and we bounce ideas off. I reached out to her to get a sense of what her project was like and then took that as a basis for when I was creating the Tasting History Project. The project in a nutshell starts with my students choosing a favorite family recipe. And they have to go home or they have to pick up the phone and call a family member overseas and record that recipe. Again, that's a powerful part of this project as well, because it's against centering families as teachers in our classroom, not just students, but also families as teachers in our classroom. And they record this recipe and then they have to translate that recipe into English. And then they have to translate that recipe into the language that someone who has never cooked that food can then follow. So for example, “cook until done” how many recipes that you might have in your family, we just sort of know, like, you cook until it's done, or like you add enough water. OK, but what does that mean? And so really thinking about the specifics and trying to write in a way that someone who's never cooked the food can write it and can follow it. After we have done the writing of the recipe and the editing of the recipe pretty intensely with many rounds of iteration, then my students turn to telling stories. And so they write a story of the particular food, of maybe it's connections to whether it's a religious holiday or a celebration, or maybe it's an everyday food they ate every day after school as a snack on their way home. But they tell a little bit about perhaps the history of this food, of the connections to how and when they eat it, and then also their memories of this food: when's the first time they ate this food? Have they tried cooking it? How successful were they? We have a lot of stories that include “I tried cooking it and I burned everything and made a mess of the kitchen the first time.” A lot of stories include who they learned cooking this recipe from– alot of grandmothers, a lot of moms. Then they tell a story of their migration and a story of their journey to the US. Included in that story is a story about food, and so do they see the same ingredients here? Are they able to find the same ingredients? What was the first food they tried when they first came that were new? Do they cook this particular recipe here and what does it make them think of? And we do all of this and then comes a really fun day– they all cook their foods and bring them in and we all try each other's food. And so again, opportunities for our students to be teachers for each other, teachers for me, and so we fill our plates and they are just piled full. It is a day where you roll out of the classroom, you are so full. After all of that, the project sort of formally ends for my students, they get their grades, we move on in terms of our study, but then I am putting together the cookbook and so adding the recipes and the photos that we've taken of the food they've cooked, putting it all together and actually I'm sending it, our newest cookbook, to the printer this week. And then we get our cookbook and each student gets a copy of the cookbook and then we share it in our community. So again, these opportunities for our students to be teachers, not just in our classroom but also in the community at large. And so that is sort of both the origins of the project and then the sort of scope of how my students and I go through the project over the course of the fall, the early fall.

What do you think food does in terms of building community and relationships as an avenue in? 

Jessica: Yeah I really like how you said that food is an avenue in. So I mean food is a powerful way to access many ideas that we are touching on in the course of our study. It is something that many of us hold dear, that we have vivid memories of. You have those like immediate food members when you taste something or think of certain foods that bring you back to moments in time, it's something that's a connector or bridge between people. I look at those connections that are built in the classroom on the day where we eat food together. And I'll have students from, say, Columbia trying food from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and say, “Oh my gosh, this is so delicious. And it tastes like something back home,” or you might have a student from Iraq tasting food from a student, a friend of theirs, from Japan. And “this is something I've never tried, but it's really, really tasty.” And so those are connections that are built between students through food. It’s also a really powerful way to start to explore stories of self. We do a lot of that in my class and this is a way to start to explore and share our parts of our history, parts of our stories. But doing it in a way where and for all the storytelling that we do. In my class, I always want my students to be able to choose how they and what they tell. But food is a really natural way to do this of you can talk about really fun, silly moments or moments with friends. I have a student who wrote about cooking their dish after a soccer game they won. But you can also tap into, if you choose to, harder stories, stories of missing family back home and not being able to have that food. Because maybe the family member who cooks it is still back home and you're here and so there are so many different ways that students can choose to start to share parts of their story and whichever part they feel comfortable with, but it allows them to see that their stories are valuable and important in our class and really centering their stories and their teaching in our classroom. And food's just a beautiful way to start this process of building community in my classroom.

How do you think this tasting history project works to decenter whiteness in your curriculum and classroom and in your school building? 

Jessica: It's centering the stories of my students. And as I said at the beginning of our conversation, my students come from more than 30 different countries from across the globe, from Brazil to the Dominican Republic. It is really important that our students still feel seen and valued, and are seen and are valued in our schools, in our classrooms. That they see themselves on the shelves of our school, that they see themselves in our lesson plans, that they see that their stories are important. So I love this project for many reasons, but I think it's a powerful one to really center the importance of my students’ voices in the room and in our community, particularly as we then share it out in the community that they're seeing themselves as teachers and seeing their stories  really valued in the community. I remember a student of mine a number of years ago was in my class did actually- he was part of the first tasting History Project Cookbook we did. And then years later we were talking about the project and he was sharing with me that he hadn't seen in school spaces that acknowledged his traditions, his language, his heritage. And so he wondered, as he shared with me with his quotes, that maybe there's no space for his traditions, his language or his heritage.  For him, he was telling me this a couple years ago, that the cookbook for him made him feel that he could be a part of this community that, and it wasn't the only thing, but that this was an important way for him to feel like he was contributing to the larger community, that his traditions were important and valued, that his language was that, his heritage, that his history was. And so I think there are powerful opportunities for our students to see that their stories are really valued in the community and that they are teachers in the community for all of our students. It's really, really important. 

Do you feel that this tasting history project also works to bring families into the folds of your school community? 

Jessica: We start the project with our students need to go to their families, that you're not going to the Internet to get these recipes. And we talk about and we're like, really like you're going to the Internet, you know, your mom's recipe is better than anything on the Internet. Our students, families are our teachers and we need to learn from them. I had students like in class Facetiming grandfathers in Brazil, and texting aunts in Cambodia, and calling up moms, and calling up sisters. These are our teachers. It is their family stories, it's my students family stories. And so we have to learn from families. And so it is a powerful way– I do a lot of family engagement work- this is a powerful way to really bring families into the heart of our learning and position them as they are as teachers in our classroom and in our communities. 

So besides the cookbook component of the project, I know that your food service department is involved. Could you speak about, first of all, could you speak about the involvement? And can you also talk a little bit about how you were able to connect with the Lowell Food Service director to bring these student recipes to life? 

Jessica: So I give full credit to the Lowell Food Service Director. So we had last fall received a Readable Feast Award for the cookbook my students wrote and published during the pandemic. The Food Service team heard about that and they reached out to us and they said, “We read about your cookbook. We think it's really exciting. We would love to collaborate with you!” It was just such an exciting e-mail to receive. I met with the director, she came in, went with the chef and we talked about how we would start a collaboration and it was, we've been collaborating for the last year. It's been a really powerful collaboration. So the first recipe that the cafeterias served was luc lok from two of our Cambodian students. Recipes, family recipes, Chef Mike came into our class, he selected the recipe, he went back to the kitchens and figured out how to cook it at scale, also in terms of there are certain ingredients you can and cannot use in a Cafeteria, but trying to really as much as possible stay true to their two family recipes. And then what I really loved, and again really showing my students that they are teachers, is he came back with individual portion sizes of the luk lok for the entire class to try and then asked for feedback,really as they should be, showing my students that they're the teachers. “Please tell me what I did wrong, what I need to do? What seasonings need to be changed? Do we need more pepper? Do we need more lime? Does it need to be wetter or drier?” And it was great. And so my students are giving him feedback on how to cook the luk lok better. And then it was served at our high school in January and then throughout the rest of the year, a recipe from the cookbook was served every month, not just in our high school, but across the entire district for about 14,000 students. And that's really powerful because in the cafeteria students wProject. We would have the cookbook and the recipe, the students’ stories there. And so again, centering our our family's history and traditions and stories right front and center that this is coming from our students and then being shared with students across the district. And it was powerful too, because it's introducing students to foods perhaps they have not tried before. Maybe they have, but perhaps they have not. So we had a recipe from Cambodia and Colombia and Guatemala and from Bangladesh and Somaliland. And Brazil served last year and that's just been, it's been a really exciting collaboration with the Food Services. And I want to give all the credit to the Food Service team at the district because they are the ones who reached out to us and they have been so deeply supportive with this project in so many ways that I could not imagine. I mean we, I created this project with my students now like five years ago and it was a cookbook project in our class, and then it's slowly expanded. I could never have thought about how to have grown when I first set out to what I see today. And that collaboration, we're also collaborating with the district's curriculum team and they are going to be teaching the cookbook in their third and 5th grade classes. And so it really is becoming part of the study of history, not just in our class, but in classes across the district and so students will be studying my students stories in I think a few months, and we also created videos of my students talking about their food and talking a little bit about the history or some of the ingredients that are used. And my students did those videos both in English and in home language and those will be shared with 3rd and 5th graders across the district in the coming months. And so these powerful collaborations, could not have imagined them years ago when we started this project, but have been really, really important in ways of sharing this book and sharing these stories and sharing my students' voices in the community and really centering them as the teachers they are in our community.

This project obviously really focuses on and celebrates diversity and equity and inclusion, I mean that seems to be what you've managed to do. In terms of their own teaching and envisioning, you know, and curriculum, what are some important things do you think that educators should consider?

Jessica: First and foremost, it's really important to create a safe environment in your classroom where your food students feel seen, where your students feel valued, where your classroom is nurturing a sense of belonging for all students. And thinking about all of the big and small ways where students can be seeing themselves in the work they're doing and in the classroom space itself. So as we're talking about earlier do they see themselves on the shelves of our classroom in our lesson plans? And then thinking about too, the ways where we are creating space to be able to learn from our students, to co-create with our students, I think it's been really powerful. For me, and I have grown and learned so much to be able to collaborate with my students on projects like the Tasting History Project or the action civics work we do together in the spring. And so what are the ways in which we can be creating spaces for our students to be taking leadership roles in our classrooms, to be teachers alongside us? How can we help create space for their voices to be heard outside of the classroom as well? I think about my own schooling and I loved and appreciated so much about my own schooling when I was a student, but one thing I found when I went to grad school and I was asked to write an op-ed that then my professor wanted us to try to get it published, it made me think that it was really one of the first times ever I've been asked to do something outside of the classroom that it would have an impact outside of the classroom rather than just for a grade. I really try to center that in my classroom's work now, is as much as possible the work we do impacts the larger community and is shared with the larger community. And so when we write op-eds, we'll actually, I take that project from grad school and we're going to start it next week, actually, in my classroom, in our high school class. Ten of those op-eds will be published in the local city newspaper. And so I think there's so many different ways that teachers should be thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion in the classroom. But particularly for thinking about how do we create spaces where our immigrant origin students feel a strong sense of belonging is thinking about those ways that they feel safe, those ways they feel seen and heard and valued, where their strengths are recognized, where they know they have advocates in the teachers, in the school, and in their peers, where they are accepted for all their beautiful identities, and where they have opportunities to grow and dream. And then those dreams are also supportive. And that's going to look like all sorts of different things you do in the way you set up a classroom, in the way you teach, in the materials you teach. In the ways in which you create space for co-leadership, co-creation with your students. But I think it's those those underlying principles that should guide the work we do as educators. 

If you, if someone who was listening to this podcast and looking at this project that this is going to be a part of wanted to start this kind of tasting history at their own school. How could they get started? Like what were your first steps? It sounds like this is gotten some wheels. 

Jessica: Yeah well one please reach out. My e-mail is jessicalander.com. Definitely please reach out. I'm happy to share material I've created and ideas and troubleshooting brainstorm. I think first is, I mean that the basis of it is relatively a simple idea of you're making a cookbook so you are working on creating recipes and you're working on creating these stories that go with it. And then it's about how do you create the the time and the structural supports to be able to do that in a really thoughtful way for your students. And a lot of it is creating space and time for iteration. That's something we do a lot of in my class, we do less projects and we spend more time on them because I think a lot of learning happens in that iteration. My students will be the first to tell you. They have gone through probably 15 rounds of edits on their stories and recipes, and it's like a running joke in my class. And they get to the point, like the first one or two or three times where they'll turn it in they'll be like, “I'm done.” And I'll be like, “great, OK, I've made edits and I've sent it back to you,” and they're like, “wait, no. But I'm done.” And I'm like, “no, no, no, there are more edits. We're we're publishing a book. We're sharing with the community. You want it to not have spelling mistakes. You want it to be really strong.” And then they get to the point like edit four or five where they're totally on board. And so they'll just, they'll text me on the school texting app we have or they'll e-mail me. “Miss Lander, I have another draft. Can you take a look, let me know and then I'll make more edits.” And they're like totally bought in with they're going to be making a lot of edits. But like that's where the learning happens and that's where we take something that is good and we make it great. And so I think one of the key things that I'd say that has been important the success of this project is creating enough space for this project so that students have time to really, really edit their recipes, really edit their stories, creating space to call or go home and get recipes from parents or family members overseas. And then thinking about ways to collaborate, I mean when I started this project, I did not envision collaborations with the District Food Services or with our curriculum team at the district. But it's been so powerful for us and so maybe starting out with a “how can we collaborate with the district's food services?” And we're working on a couple projects now this year that is taking the Tasting History Project and thinking about new ways we can collaborate with different members of our school community. And so what are the ways that you can bring in other folks into this project? It's only going to make the project richer for everyone. 

You're such an inspiring teacher, obviously. I mean I'm not in your class, but I taught history for 20 years before I got to Mass Farm to School and I can just hear the excitement in your voice, not only for your classroom but for your students and for the whole process of education and teaching and learning. And your students are clearly just so lucky to have you as as a teacher, and for new citizens and new immigrants to this country, I appreciate that you're kind of the face of you're the Ambassador, you're representing our country, right, with students who maybe don't know other Americans and haven't experienced it and then they meet you and they get welcomed in this way, so I appreciate that so much!

Jessica: Thank you. I mean, it is, it's such an honor to work with and learn from my students every day. My students bring such a tremendous wealth of strengths to our classroom and to communities. And it is so powerful to have the opportunity to learn from them, to watch them grow, to watch them become leaders in our community. And so it's. They inspire me everyday and it is a joy and such an honor to work with them.