Cooking With Purpose: Redesigning Food Production Through Community Engagement
Presented by:
Michelle Alcorn, Texas Tech University
Empowering hospitality students to transform culinary skills into community impact by planning, producing, and delivering freezer-friendly meals for families supported by a community partner.
Keywords:
Community-Engaged Learning, Food Production Education, Nonprofit Partnership
Abstract:
This project redesigns a university food production course into a community-engaged learning (CEL) course, connecting academic learning to real-world service that creates mutual benefit for students and the community. Students collaborated with a nonprofit organization supporting families in crisis to plan, prepare, and deliver nutritious, freezer-friendly meals. The course integrated food production, cost control, and food safety with civic engagement and reflection. Through applied practice, students developed technical proficiency, empathy, and professional readiness. This session will share the course design, assessment strategies, impact measurement techniques, and future steps for expanding community-engaged learning across hospitality and foodservice curricula.
Outcomes:
1. Recognize how community-engaged learning can enhance hospitality and food production education.
2. Identify key components of course design, assessment, and impact measurement used in this CEL project.
3. Envision ways to adapt similar community-based approaches within their own teaching contexts.
Hear it from the author:
Transcript:
References:
Michaud, T. S., & Sanford, R. M. (2018). Injecting new workforce leaders in tourism, hospitality, and environmental science: A community-engaged learning and immersion class. Maine Policy Review, 27(1), 79–85.
Nguyen, J. J., & Condry, D. L. J. (2023). Evaluating differences in community-engaged learning and service-learning via the context, input, process, and product model. Frontiers in Education, 8, Article 1289322. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1289322
Smyth, T. J. (2016). Value added: Learning communities, experiential process, and student engagement in lifelong learning in the culinary arts. Learning Communities: Research & Practice, 4(2), Article 4.
Tuma, L. A., & Sisson, L. G. (2019). Becoming an engaged department: Scaffolding community-based learning into the hospitality and tourism management curriculum. Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Education, 31(3), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/10963758.2018.1487783