Appetite for history: Instructor makes food a centerpiece of SFCC course
She teaches history through food.
And her choice ingredients – chocolate, coffee, booze – seem to really resonate with students, many of whom take her class simply because it’s a requirement at Spokane Falls Community College.
“History,” Stenzel said, “should never be dull.”
This is her first quarter teaching History 136, or U.S. History I, with the common thread of food-related events, dates and anecdotes. The course covers North American exploration and colonization through the Civil War. That’s a time period which stretches from about 20,000 BCE through 1865 – or, roughly, some 22,000 years.
Foodstuffs help contextualize that vast time span as well as help students meet course learning outcomes. Those goals include understanding that “past events not only shape current and future events, but also form traceable patterns useful for interpreting modern events” and the ability to draw “appropriate connections from the various branches of historical study: political, social, economic, intellectual, geographic and cultural.”
Chocolate, coffee and alcohol permeate all of those branches – not just the obvious social and cultural elements – and Stenzel, 41, explains how with the help of some nontraditional texts. Her required reading isn’t the 10-pound textbook. Instead, she uses these four, modern soft-cover books:
• “How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food & Culture,” by Jennifer Jensen Wallach
• “Drinking in America: A History” by Mark E. Lender and James K. Martin
• “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” by Tom Standage
• “The True History of Chocolate” by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
This quarter, her class meets for an hour weekday mornings. Stenzel lectures Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. She isn’t into PowerPoint. She asks many questions and does lots of what she calls “scribbling” on the board.
“It’s super-interactive,” said 17-year-old Destiny Maher, a Running Start student from Rogers High School who sits near the front in Stenzel’s class. “When you do it on slides, it feels a lot more scripted.
“I like her approach because it’s a little bit more modern,” Maher continued. “When you base it on things we already know about, it makes it a little bit more relatable. I never thought something such as coffee would be such a huge part of history.”
A recent Tuesday lecture discussed the role of coffee in the Enlightenment, tracing its roots to newly established coffee houses in Vienna, Paris, England and colonial America in the 1600s.
As coffee’s popularity grew and spread into the next century, people drank less beer and grog. Instead of feeling the dulling effects of the alcohol, they began to experience the stimulating effects of caffeine.
“Not only are you not getting tipsy, it wakes you up,” Stenzel said.
At coffee houses, people from different walks of life began exchanging ideas about religion, science, politics and – particularly in colonial America – revolution.
“Coffee houses tend to be very egalitarian,” Stenzel said. “In a coffee house, people’s ideas were equal. You didn’t have to be a minister. You didn’t have to be a barrister. You could just be a bloke. People listened to everyone’s ideas” – although, at that time, Stenzel acknowledged, it was mostly men that were doing the talking.
An adjunct professor at SFCC since January, Stenzel has master’s degrees in history and music history.
Originally from Spokane, she left her hometown after high school to do undergraduate work at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. She completed the first of her two master’s degrees at the University of Idaho in 1998.
After a stint on the East Coast, she returned to Spokane when her husband, now a forensic scientist, got a job as a professor at Gonzaga University. They have three children ages 13, 11 and 9.
Stenzel finished her second master’s degree at Eastern Washington University last year. That’s when she got the idea to teach history through food.
“I thought: How can I sell history to people?” she said. “If you could pick any theme, why not pick something more at the student level?”
But Stenzel didn’t think a single ingredient – chocolate, for example – would be enough to carry the entire quarter. So she added alcohol and coffee.
“America is a coffee nation,” she said. “We don’t drink tea. We drink coffee.”
George Washington was a coffee drinker. So was John Adams. Benjamin Franklin, too.
“If you want to make a statement, the biggest way is with your money,” Stenzel said of the colonists’ boycott of tea in the years leading to the Revolutionary War. “Coffee becomes the patriotic drink.”
Stenzel devotes Fridays to her own version of Trivial Pursuit, based on the 10 questions each of the 43 students in her class create each week as homework.
“I like tricking them into reviewing, and they even argue about it,” she said, mimicking a student in a proud, not mean, way. “That’s not what emancipation means.”
Students get to decide which questions are “good” questions. They also get to identify the worst, such as – and these are real examples – “Who sailed the ocean blue in 1942?” and “What was the Quackers original name?”
There are more traditional elements, too: weekly quizzes, midterm and final exams, and three peer-reviewed, journal article summaries in Chicago Style.
“It’s a very simplistic thing to say the Enlightenment is based on coffee. But I think it’s not a stretch to say coffee could have had some effect. I think we can say there can be a small connection between coffee and people drinking it and trading ideas.”
Stenzel is slated to teach modern American history, from the Civil War through present day, next quarter. She plans to carry on the food theme.
But don’t bring breakfast or any kind of snacks. Food isn’t allowed in her class. It says so right in Stenzel’s syllabus. Beverages are “permissible.” But that doesn’t include booze.
Often, students bring coffee.