Lead: Prof. Todd Armstrong, Professor of Russian
Vivero Fellow (2026-2027): Bruno Sica
I am excited to work with a Vivero Fellow this semester in my course RUS 214 “Comrades in the Kitchen: Russian and Soviet Food Culture.” I have in mind a principal task for the fellow, as well as some secondary projects. Each will involve mentoring and technical work with my students; I will welcome feedback and creative input in all aspects of the course.
- I want to improve the final group project in my course. In this assignment, students work in teams to develop a 5 to 6 minute, fully researched and carefully designed and produced digital narrative/cooking documentary video. While the project has functioned fairly well over the years, In collaboration with my Vivero Fellow, I would like to refine it further, redesigning some of its components, developing a more scaffolded approach, and providing more direct assistance and mentoring for groups completing the project. I would also like to develop a website where the videos could be archived, and which students could later access.
- Additionally, I have included in the beginning of the semester various versions of a small-group assignment in which small groups write up a recipe for a dish we improvise in the Global Kitchen (usually a soup or a vegetarian fritter). We prepare a dish according to my direction, using the exercise to orient ourselves to the Global Kitchen and to working together. In previous iterations of this assignment, students create the list of ingredients, write up the process for the recipe, and produce imagery to accompany the recipe. My goal has always been to get the versions onto our course website/blog, but I’ve been less effective in following up on that, and I would welcome assistance and mentoring in this aspect of my course. This could lead to a series of course recipes and an on-line Comrades cookbook, an aspiration I’ve had since I began teaching this course. (My Vivero Fellow may find of interest my own food blog, www.foodiowa.com, to get a sense of how I approach this kind of work.) I think this assignment will also help me scaffold the work on the final digital narrative assignment.
- An aspirational goal: Another aspect to the course, relatively new this year, concerns my work in the Grinnell College Garden, where I have been working to ensure that there are various ingredients for use in the Global Kitchen. I would like to develop some on-line guides for the vegetables we’ll be using, along with the recipes we work with. I am also a longtime forager, and I would very much like to tell the story of our foraging in the course.
