Corn bread recipe from YouTube Extravaganza

Robin and I were asked to share the recipe for the cornbread we brought to Monday's YouTube Extravaganza.  Here it is!

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Skillet Piñon Corn Bread

Ingredients:

• 1/4 c butter, melted
• 2 tbsp canola oil or vegetable oil
• 1/4 c warm water
• 1/2 c buttermilk (we used yogurt)
• 2 eggs
• Dry ingredients
• 1 and 1/4 c cornmeal
• 3/4 c all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 c piñon nuts, toasted (pine nuts)
• 1/2 c fresh corn kernels, roasted
• 15 fresh sage leaves, chopped (we used some dried, as we had no fresh)
• 1 small onion, diced

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 400ºF.
2. Whisk together the butter, oil, water, buttermilk, and eggs in a mixing bowl.  Set aside.
3. Combine the dry ingredients and sift into a separate mixing bowl.
4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix until completely incorporated.
5. Stir in the pine nuts, corn kernels, sage, and onion until incorporated.  (We also put in some Mexican cheese at this point.)
6. Coat a 10-inch ovenproof cast iron skillet with softened butter (about 2 tbsp) and heat in the oven for 5 minutes.
7. Remove the hot skillet and pour the batter into it. (We put in 1/2 the batter, then put in some chopped roasted poblano peppers, then put the other half of the batter in.)
8. Bake for 18-20 mins (ours was much longer but Alice's oven is a little cool) or until a paring knife or toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center.
9. Remove skillet from the oven and let cool slightly.
10. Serve out of the skillet.

Yield: 12-14 servings.

From Flavored Breads: Recipes from Mark Miller's Coyote Café.  By Mark Miller, Andrew MacLauchlan and John Harrison.  Ten Speed Press, Berkeley CA (1996).  Recipe on p. 15.

Linking Theory and Practice - Part 2 of 2

One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to link theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.

Community-Centeredness

I consider this dimension as the newest to me and the one that I have spent most of the time working on and the one I most enjoyed. This dimension encourages both students and faculty to learn from one another, and fosters the development identity as a profession in class and out of class.

A statement that I always like to emphasize in my teaching philosophy is to state explicitly in the teaching philosophy document that I would encourage the community-centeredness in developing the systems perspective in my students. Since this was my first time to interact with students at this capacity as a TA, I found myself confused and need to learn with them in so many occasions. I believe that there is no harm of showing that you are confused even though some students do not feel comfortable with that. However, I found that most of the students learn a lot when we are working together on a problem. I am afraid that this feeling would vanish after a while when I start to master the material and the best way to present it, and this is why I should state this in my teaching philosophy that I must show the students that I am learning with them. Personally, and keeping the systems perspective in mind, there are always new angles to look at things when thinking holistically. I would consider this fitting well with community-centered lens in the HPL framework.

During my office hours, it was clear to me that “people learn differently.” Unlike regular office hours for other classes where students approach the TA with their questions, I tried to generate during my office hours an environment that is very similar to the lab environment, in which students sit down on a computer and the TA approaches them when they have questions. It is important to emphasize here that they still had the freedom to work on their own, individually or with their teams, to show up and leave whenever they wanted, and to browse the internet and do any other side activities they wanted. Interestingly, most of the students who showed up did so for the entire period of office hours of two hours, asked questions all the time, were less stressed, and rarely, or never, did they do any other side activities. I think this is because they showed up for a single purpose of completing their tasks; they had the motivation.

Some of the students had team meetings during the office hours and were asking questions as a team. It seemed that their team was well established and they were doing collaborative work very nicely together. Some other students were working individually and they benefited well from the one-to-one interaction. I have to point here that I did not have the key solutions for the homeworks that they were working on, and found myself working with them to solve the problems together. This is a very key point. I think not having the final answers helped a lot in generating more a community-centered learning environment where students and the TA were learning from one another. I felt that students learned a lot from the techniques they were seeing me using to tackle the problems. I found most of them giving me ideas to solve the problems, and they were very good ideas. In the beginning I felt that they lost their trust in me because they felt that I did not have the answer, but that feeling disappeared immediately when they saw me working on the problem with them. It was a mixed feeling of confusion, experimenting with the problems we had, and eventually exploring. I was sure that they learned a lot from these sessions. Compared to other situations where I had the key solutions before the students approached me, I am confident now that this approach of teaching is far more effective. Before this experience, I used to rush to give the students all the details of the problem to get to the solution. But now I think this effective approach is more community-, learner-, and knowledge-centered. A challenge remains on how to generate the same atmosphere of making the students “think” when I already know the answers to their question.

This dimension required me to develop confidence. In fact, some of the students in their feedback to me mentioned that they enjoyed this approach. A question that remains on this dimension is how to maintain this attitude toward teaching without getting bored doing the same thing over and over again. One professor whom I interviewed answered this question by telling me to do new things each time. He himself mentioned to me that he even went to sit down in a class to learn the theory of relativity and then teach it to his students in a new class that he has developed.

I am generally pleased with the feedback that the students provided to me on the course evaluation feedback. I believe the theory we learn about engineering education should be linked to practice.

Linking Theory and Practice - Part 1 of 2

One of the competencies that Ph.D. students in the Engineering Education program at Purdue are required to achieve is to teach engineering. I would like to share in two consecutive posts some of the reflections I once had after working as a teaching assistant for a freshman class of engineering here at Purdue. I believe this is a good effort to linking theory (and philosophy) of engineering education, that we talked about in class this semester, to practice.

As a student, I always enjoyed seeing the relationships between seemingly unrelated topics in the engineering curriculum. I also enjoyed discovering these relationships in the field as a practicing engineer; the relationships between different engineering and non-engineering disciplines. And now as teaching assistant for the freshman engineering class at Purdue, I would like to transfer this important skill to my students.

I am a Teaching Assistant (TA) for a freshmen course in engineering at Purdue. Even though I am considered as a millennial, I feel that my students learn and interact, or prefer to interact while learning, somehow differently from me. But I still feel comfortable with all the situations I have encountered thus far with them. In fact, the framework described in A Generational Approach to Understanding Students by Coomes and DeBard emphasizes that “the variance within groups is always greater than the variance between groups.” I fully agree with this statement in that we might have different perspectives on teaching and learning, or on different ethnic and cultural issues, but we, the students and myself, are still more flexible and willing to adapt to our differences between ourselves than to adapt to the differences with an older generation. This can be partly because we share the same experience of expressing ourselves as being different from the older generations, and because we, as a generation, have to interact with the same larger “cultural force” that is more different from us.

In my two posts on this topic, I will discuss my growth and teaching experience along two of the four How People Learn (HPL) dimensions: the Assessment-Centered, and Community-Centered dimensions. The other two dimensions that are not discussed are the Knowledge-Centered and the Learner-Centered dimensions. I also asked the students to provide feedback for me on my performance as experienced by them in each one of the four dimensions. The feedback is not included in the posts; some of my reflections on it are included though.

Assessment-Centeredness

I had a math professor who used to say, “Let’s make a reality check!” By this he means that he wants to assess our understanding to the concepts that he has just explained in the classroom and during the lecture. He is an old but intelligent professor. To bridge the gap between us and him, he usually gave examples of so many applications that we use in our daily life that utilize the concepts he explains. For example, he gave examples on how the Fourier Transform and the Fast Fourier Transform are everywhere in our digital age, and how these abstract mathematical concepts found their way to applications in fascinating devices like the iPods and the like.

In the beginning, as a student and as an instructor, I always undervalued grades as a way to assess understanding. Also, in the beginning of the semester, I hated when students asked about grades as I wanted them to focus on understanding the materials. In addition to that, the structure of the course I taught did not allow adding more burdens on either the students or the instructors for more grading. I believe that there are many ways to assess understanding.

For example, I once had a professor who assesses understanding in a very interesting and effective way. Contrary to the conventional approach, he showed up in the beginning of the semester and wrote in large letters on the board “No questions!” And between “No” and “questions” in the previous sentence there was the word “dumb”- No dumb questions! That is a call for challenge. Engineers like to be challenged. This is why they are in this profession. They do not like to be in a math class where the professor quizzes them to assess their understanding, or in large classroom where they communicate their Yes-No responses to a question for the sake of assessing their understanding. They like to talk about what they do because they like doing it. This is why instructors should give them the chance to talk, and this is why instructors should challenge them to talk. They should talk beyond the Yes-No response if an instructor wants to assess their understanding of a design concept or idea. Of course, there are no such things as dumb questions.

Also, a crucial part of achieving my personal philosophy of developing a systems perspective of engineering with the students is the use of challenging take-home, open world exams. My observation from grading exams is that students who get an A in an exam are not necessarily the best. That is, they were able to absorb the assigned material very well, and achieved the learning objectives of that exam, but they were not exceedingly excellent in going beyond the expectations, which is the unique characteristic of an A-student. (The nature of these exams, however, is understandable for a huge class like this!) Take-home, open world exams simulate the real world, and require the students to think holistically, given the relaxed exam conditions, and thus achieving the purpose of developing the systems perspective.

In addition to take-home exams, reality check of key concepts should be made. From my personal experience I found that pop quizzes that ask about key concepts are the best in assessing students’ understanding of key concepts. Quizzes should be application-oriented to see if students can really apply an abstract concept to a given situation in an application, which is similar to what an engineer would face in reality. I would consider this fitting well with assessment-centered lens in the HPL framework.

Another experience I had that is related to this dimension was during grading. Grading and giving feedback might be time consuming but it is really important. It was difficult for me to just give the student that her or his answer was wrong, and I felt all the time that it was important to provide feedback on the graded material. This feedback may involve clarifying or explaining the mistake or the fact. I think that despite the fact that this was a time consuming process, my hope in the beginning of the semester was that the students will benefit from that. And they did. Most of them did. In the past, I noticed improvements in the performance of individual students by considering the comments that are in the form of the feedback.

Because I still do not value numerical grades too much, I structured my questions in the HPL evaluation feedback I asked the students to complete for me around feedback that I have provided to them on graded homeworks and exams. That said, however, my understanding of this assessment-centeredness dimension made me believe in the importance of returning graded homeworks quickly to the students, as they seem to need this.