Alex Hogue, assistant professor of German, and Simone Boissonneault, lecturer of German, both in the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, created a video to supplement their instruction on cooking in which they prepare Käsespätzle in their home kitchen. Below, Hogue explains the motivation and purpose behind the video. Watch the entire video here.
The video goes with a lesson on understanding recipes in German, which, if we were in the classroom, would be based on working through recipe texts (ingredients, measurements, processes, etc). In years past when this lesson has come up, I’ve always lamented to my classes how cool it would be if rather than just talking about cooking, we could actually do it as part of the lesson and now, since we can’t be in the classroom and Simone and I love to cook, making a cooking video seemed like a way to bring some life and fun into this really stressful situation.
When I lived in Tübingen during my doctoral work, my roommates taught me how to make Käsespätzle just like this and, since this dish is relatively simple, can be made vegetarian, and is everything macaroni and cheese ever wanted to be but couldn’t, it seemed like this would be a good introduction to German food for our students. Besides, cheesy noodles are comfort food, and who couldn’t use some comfort during a crisis?
Pedagogically speaking, we run our German 115 classes on the flipped classroom hybrid model. The students had already worked through several lessons covering types and nationalities of food, nutritional values, metric measurements, and restaurants, so this lesson served half as review of much of that material and half as a way to contextualize the content in something practical and potentially familiar. It also introduced the command form of verbs, which is why I make a point of telling Simone to do the various prep activities (fry the bacon, grate the cheese, etc).
The students were not required to cook for themselves (they were encouraged, though!), but I posted the recipe on Moodle and tasked them with working through it and rewriting the commands from the formal you (Sie) into the informal you (du) and then video chatting with their usual partners/groups to practice these forms. These exercises mirrored activities in the book which we would have done in class, but with the added benefit of the video which allowed us to demonstrate the meanings of the German vocabulary, rather than relying on translations back to English when things were unclear.
