INTERVIEW & OBSERVATION

Many goals prompted the initiation of this learning experience for Dan. In our interview, he outlined his goals as “first, I had a general interest in learning a new cooking skill; then, I thought about how much I love a challenge (but didn’t want to be too challenged); finally, I decided on challah because it’s a food so tied to our lives” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021). The concept of “lifelong skill” surfaced many times in our conversation; it was clear that Dan saw this experience as skill building--something he would use again and again. He looked forward to “the product at the end,” but even more importantly, “the enjoyment others will have from something that I created” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021). He planned an entire dinner to go with his bread. Even though he asked for help with the dinner, the bread was his to accomplish alone. 

Dan’s process “wasn’t smooth,” he said, but his “motivation stayed intact” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021). Throughout the baking process, there were a few disruptions: 1) Dan received a phone call that forced him to leave the kitchen for 15 minutes 2) when braiding the challah, he realized he was doing it incorrectly, so he had to re-think his approach. This moment of redoing was when the “real learning began,” he said. This moment made him more cognizant of his learning. Before the braiding, he merely followed step-by-step instructions, almost blindly and without much thought. When he realized he “messed up,” he had to pause, think, and act.  He said, “I had to think--I didn’t have to think when I was just doing the recipe, but that part with the braid I had to think.”  He reflected, “I was irritated that I didn’t get it immediately, but my irritation didn’t last long” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021). He noted that he realized he needed a new tool--a new source--to figure out what went wrong. At first, he only used written instructions with pictures. When he then switched to watching a video tutorial, his understanding of the process changed: “I started pausing the video, trying, going back, restarting. I started gaining confidence as I focused and tried, and tried again.” Once he completed the braid correctly, Dan visually looked confident--he stood up straight, clapped his hands, smiled, and said, “Woot! There it is!” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021).

There was a clear linear structure to Dan’s day of baking this loaf: clean and prep kitchen, mix ingredients, let it rise, braid, let it rise, bake. While the structure worked well for his process and success, he said, he would make changes if baking again: “I would turn off my phone--the distraction of the phone call frazzled me. I would also have cleared the work area more, taking the jars off the counter. And, I would have learned how to knead bread before the moment that I needed to actually do it.” When I asked him to expand on his comment about kneading, he said, “I felt like I was making it up as I was doing it--not quite sure I was doing it correctly. In the end it worked, but I would’ve been more confident if I had read about it first” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021). 

Multiple times in our interview, Dan mentioned being proud of the final product. He remarked, “The most important thing is that people enjoyed the bread when it was done” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021). Each time the bread was rising, he checked on it, and when it was in the oven, he peered into the oven window multiple times. The outcome, he acknowledged, was how he’d determine if he learned or not. Before our interview, and even before he began baking, Dan mentioned his lack of prior knowledge: “I’ve never done this before,” he said twice. But, he also mentioned how he wasn’t going into this project completely blind: “You make bread all of the time, so I’ve seen it happen in action, even if I wasn’t really paying attention.” To him, there was a certain level of comfort from having been nearby when I made bread in the past. He ended the conversation thinking about the future: “I intend to bake more bread again--other people can enjoy it, and my wife doesn’t have to do all of the baking” (D. Tress, personal communication, Nov. 14, 2021).