Using an extended food metaphor to explain concepts about pedagogy

It is anathema for educators to describe pedagogy as having a recipe—it is tantamount to saying it is a technicist process rather than a professional one requiring active, informed decision making. But if teacher educators are to help novice teachers understand what pedagogy is and how it can be understood, there must be a starting point for pedagogical knowledge to shape both the understanding and design of appropriate curriculum learning. To address this challenge, I argue that food-preparation processes and learning how to competently cook are analogous to grasping how pedagogy—which is also about process, design, and making knowledge knowable—facilitates learning about teaching specific curriculum knowledge. To do so, I use evidence from an initial teacher education (ITE) cohort lecture on pedagogy as a case study. In essence, viewing pedagogy through the lens of food and recipes may help make some abstractions of pedagogy more concrete and make some principles of pedagogy more accessible to novice teachers as they learn to design learning.