Achieving Excellence by Means of Critical Reflection and Cultural Imagination in Culinary Arts and Gastronomy Education

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate that in raising the discipline of culinary arts and gastronomy beyond the craft/vocational level to under/postgraduate degree level, educators need to become critically reflective and knowledgeable (qualified) and enable students to learn how to learn, to become entrepreneurial and technological innovators, and to lead worthwhile lives as citizens, with a sense of mission and responsibility for the planet and the poor. It draws on a lifetime's study and experience in culinary arts education, transforming craft-based vocational programs into cognitive educational ones, preparing students to become more than cooking operatives, and introducing concepts that establish culinary arts and gastronomy as serious disciplines worthy of full academic status. Critical reflection allows practitioners to think critically about their practices. It allows educators to become critically reflexive practitioners. It facilitates culinary arts and gastronomy students and researchers. It allows them to become resource persons (consultants), offering guidelines and suggesting approaches to critical thinking and problem solving. Critical reflection engages culinary arts and gastronomy students and researchers in exploring the learning–teaching process in a manner that enhances the development of the discipline's knowledge base. It involves both the study of a situation with a view to improving the quality of the action within it and challenging the orthodoxy of traditional methods of education in the field. In short, it is an approach to excellence. In seeking to raise the academic level of culinary, gastronomy, and hospitality education to excellence, lecturers need to enable students to become involved in the assessment process by becoming critically reflective learners. Students must learn how to learn, to assess their own and others' learning through collaborative, peer, and self-assessment processes.