Bad schooling is on the rise.

The successful spread of neoliberal sensibilities and strategies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have produced increasingly commodified, homogenized, and standardized experiences for both teachers and students. In other words, education is becoming less inspiring and, well, let’s be honest, more stultifying. But just as gastronomy can be a tonic for bad eating, Alimentary Education is designed to serve as an antidote to bad schooling. Alimentary Ed derives its meaning from Latin alere, “to nourish, rear, support, maintain.”

Among other things, Alimentary Ed notices chefs, gastronomic trends, culinary sensibilities, science and the humanities, passion, creativity, and innovation, as well as both the powers and the pleasures of sensory experiences. At its core, Alimentary Ed aims to create something more nourishing, rearing, supporting, maintaining, and satisfying than what is currently on offer in supermarket schooling and big-box approaches to education.

“Certainly, learning can be made an erotic, highly pleasurable activity. Now, that a teacher should be incapable of revealing this, that [his or her] job should virtually consist of showing how unpleasant, sad, dull and unerotic learning is--to me, this is an incredible achievement.”

- Michel Foucault (1975)

Nearly Ready…

Chefs-Classroom-Ed

Chef's Classroom

chef pedagogues

Pop-Up Ed

Pop-Up Education

emphemeral education

circa 1955:  An American 'Bookmobile' mobile library with children leaving it as another customer arrives in a residential area of New Rochelle, New York State.  (Photo by Vecchio/Three Lions/Getty Images)

The TasteMobile

a mobile gustocracy unit

EDstivals-Ed

EDstivals

gatherings for festive education

Still Fermenting…

digressions

TastyED

…an after-school program for kids inspired by innovative sensory education programs.

digressions

TastyED+

…an after-work program for adults inspired by innovative sensory education programs and the joys of beer/wine tasting.

digressions

Ghost Classrooms

…the use of ghost kitchens is on the rise. Why not ghost classrooms?

digressions

Curious Case of Time in Pedagogy

…an old grad school project, unboxed, dusted off, and cross-pollinated by a Jenny Linford book.