The Practical Side of Culinary Arts Education: The Role of Social Ability and Durable Knowledge in Culinary Arts Externships

<p>As externships evolved from their vocational education roots into the university setting, both the course purposes and the expectations of student changed toward deeper learning. While the students’ responsibility for gaining knowledge has increased, teaching methods designed by educators to prepare students for more critically evaluated outcomes has not evolved at the same pace. Educators still grapple over how educational design can combine the structured teacher-centered learning strategy used in university classrooms with the learner-centered approach students typically utilize in for-profit culinary workplaces.</p> <p>This dissertation is about culinary externships in the urban environment. The study examined the roles, reasoning, and behavior of culinary externship stakeholders: student externs, externship sites via their externship supervisors, and educators who facilitate externships under the academic rules and guidelines of both culinary bachelor programs and the rigor demanded by higher education. Further, the study explored what factors encouraged and empowered students to acquire durable knowledge from their externship experiences and the forms of social capital they use to invest in their experience, as well as the conditions that failed to secure durable knowledge from the externship.</p> <p>The findings indicate that each stakeholder approaches an externship from their own working perspectives. Further, the ability of students to socialize, utilize agency to achieve their personal ends, bear the sole weight of evaluation, and acquire practical work experience prior to the externship yielded the best outcomes. Additional questions are posed and answered within the study.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Planning and Urban Studies

Year

2012

Author dc:creator

• Thibodeaux, William R

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. David Gladstone
• Dr. Pamela Jenkins
• Dr. Martha Ward

• externships, internships, social capital, symbolic capital, culinary education
• Urban Studies and Planning

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1571

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-2600