1.8: Across Students, Sites and Educators - Themes

As one looks at across the cases consisting of students, internship sites, and educators included in the study, the overarching themes could best be summarized as involvement, environment, social capital, and symbolic capital. Lacking from these separate themes is agency (the ability and motivation to act) because it is ubiquitous to all. As I began the study, previous insights suggested to me that agency was, indeed, a primary factor toward achieving success. What emerged for me during the course of the study was a different way of thinking about agency. Though vital to success, it is catalyzed by numerous factors.

As the findings tend to indicate, agency is more of a personal motivation that spurs students on to success, something prized by elite culinary sites, and noted with consequence by educators. Agency alone, however, does not provide direction. The lack of a viable plan for example renders agency ineffective. Equally, agency in and of itself cannot always overcome a lack of social capital (socialization tactics), involving the belief that one can act, or symbolic capital such as the seasoned ability and experience that allows the student intern to seize the opportunity to act.

Students

Freshmen. Freshmen opinions were surprisingly congruent with the thoughts and opinions of successful sophomores and seniors. A sense of the ‘applied’ nature of the culinary field was apparent in each of these respondent groups. Like the consistent themes from their upper-level constituents, they believed that personal involvement in each aspect of the internship process, and their learning in general, was essential to their success. They believed that the real world experience would provide them with important knowledge to further plan accurately from a first-hand experience regarding what would be expected of them in the future. Additionally, they saw the internship as an interaction with others who possessed superior skills that would help them gauge where they stood in terms of their own ability providing a real world assessment opportunity to extend proficiencies and correct or refine inconsistencies.

They did express apprehension regarding how they would perform, but the curiosity of learning and knowing was the stronger force. All successful students, at one time or another, fear failure. What sets them apart from others is never being afraid to try. These were the important freshmen themes and also the themes expressed by those students who achieved success. What separated these survey class freshmen from their sophomore and senior counterparts was the traditional classroom setting and future orientation of their learning environment.

Sophomores and seniors. Traditional disciplines focus the academic rigor on classroom learning and assessment. The students’ ability to excel in this environment has been refined and reinforced over many years of classroom endeavors. All understand how to prepare for multiple choice, true or false, short essay, and research paper testing methods. A student who excels in this environment might well graduate with honors when they receive their bachelor’s credential. In traditional disciplines the ultimate assessment of the students’ ability to apply what was learned occurs in the workplace. This is where the similarity between traditional disciplines and applied disciplines ends.

Scrutiny involves doing. In an applied field such as Culinary Arts, emphasis on learning does not center on the traditional classroom schema found in other higher education programs. The actual academic rigor occurs in the laboratory setting. Similar to other traditional disciplines, classroom rigor does exist utilizing traditional testing, critical writing, and so forth - assessment methods familiar to students. However, in the culinary laboratory setting hands-on assessment begins when students enter the laboratory and continues until they leave which represents a foreign and at times uncomfortable form of scrutiny to students.

The laboratory environment more closely resembles the restaurant setting where textbook knowledge and actual execution come together to form the assessment model. In many of the laboratory exercises students must execute the exercise within the time limit set by the instructor. Thus, the student must demonstrate knowledge, ability, and quickness. This environment is structured to allow students to equally assess areas of strength and weakness that need attention and more practice. Students work closely with each other, bonds are formed, but also the awareness of who is excelling and who is not also becomes readily and visually apparent. You cannot improve speed and accuracy, develop your ability to discern flavor profiles, or improve eye-hand coordination by reading the text. While some students are born with these skills, many need additional practice and constant repetition.

The student - internship site match. As one looks across the different urban culinary operations it thus becomes immediately apparent that the students’ work environment is an important consideration when selecting an internship site. Many student want to intern in high profile restaurants never considering whether the skills they possess match the requirements of the site or their willingness to teach. A good match, allows the intern to experience and learn much of the kitchen operation. They feel valued and a productive team environment exists. A poor match is thus far less beneficial for the student.

It is important for the student to become involved in negotiating what they would learn from the site. The site is always considering their best interests – the student must do the same. If the work environment is truly give and take, and the student in seen as a potential productive member of the operation, that chef will teach the student durable skills that transfer to the classroom and beyond. However, at the other end of the spectrum, sometimes the interests of the operation are the only consideration involving a different kind of give and take. The operation is providing the student with a real life experience and that’s enough of a contribution on their part. In return, the student helps them lower their labor costs. There is no durable knowledge transfer involved on the part of the site. What the student learns is directly proportionate to his or her ability to create their own take-away knowledge.

To bring home the true sense of the aforementioned I offer this simple example obtained through discussions with student interns. When a student becomes involved with a site that does not provide a teaching environment and is not actively involved with the student learning from the internship experience, that student might return to the university with a copy of the restaurant’s menu and the recipes he or she was allowed to prepare. In essence, the student might have simply purchased the restaurant’s cookbook and saved themselves the time spent following static cooking directions. They were allowed to ‘practice’ in a real operation – but the goal unachieved was durable learning that improved their knowledge and enhance their ability to excel during an internship or work experience at the next level.

The student lacks a progression of knowledge and skills enhancement from the sophomore level internship to the senior level endeavor where a position with that restaurant would be the overarching goal. A student intern in a productive environment with reciprocal involvement by the internship site facilitator would probably also return with a menu and recipes as part of the deliverables to demonstrate the complexity of the restaurant's food. The difference lies in that student’s acquired durable knowledge. In addition to a physical menu and its recipes, things that often change over time in all restaurants, the student now has the ability to discuss what theme the chef was exploring when the menu was constructed, why the recipe inclusions best represented that theme, and how different flavors choices were constructed so that no matter which items were ordered by the customer, the desired theme carried throughout the meal. That student left the site with durable knowledge by understanding the proper criteria to devise a menu, carefully select items for inclusion, and balance flavor profiles.

Based on student respondent comments and stated outcomes, the internship environment is essential to experiencing a productive internship. Did the successful interns place strong value on the site selection process? The resounding answer was yes. Do all student interns make thoughtful selections beneficial to their education and future goals? Unfortunately the answer was no. As some student respondents indicated, the site selection process was not considered in advance and in fact, many students waited until the last minute. Different student reasons for procrastination surfaced during the study but two important ‘surface’ responses were the “lack of time” for that particular consideration due to other priorities and “I was told that my skill set did not match the site I wanted so I had to hurry to find another site.” Both responses elude to one of the important vices that student’s in this applied field face – what I refer to as “grade think” common to students prior to entering the higher education environment and most certainly during their tenure at a university.

The focus on grades. The traditional indication of success in education is the grade a student receives for their coursework. Cumulatively, the grade point average has been instilled as the numerical value of concern. Thus their focus on other coursework and obtaining the appropriate grade takes precedence over current beneficial actions that, at the present, bear no weight on what is valued, their grades. The grade focus is not limited to the classroom. It also transfers to the laboratory setting creating a negative impact on their future endeavors. Should they receive a superior grade on laboratory exercises some students assume that they have met the proper proficiency measure for a real world high quality restaurant. They tend to misinterpret the focused exercise in comparison to the manifold actions required in a busy restaurant environment. No further practice occurs because an inaccurate skill assessment has been made.

Of course, there are students who see the need for additional work, but ‘time’ again becomes the issue with other class concerns and probably outside work, in many cases not related to their field, shortening the amount of time left in the day for things such as practicing practical culinary skills.

These students while academically strong have failed to acquire in some cases the social capital and in other cases the symbolic capital in the form of practical skill necessary to becoming part of a highly productive and interactive top quality restaurant team. Higher education lauds academic performance and the hospitality Industry also values critical thinking ability but a disconnection between industry and education exists because education does value application at the same high level of importance that industry places on it. Some students become trapped between these different perceptions of what performance means as it relates to those who require it.

Urban Internship Sites. One purpose of higher education or education in general for that matter, is to replenish the nation’s workforce. In the field of culinary arts, urban elite restaurants and those restaurants slightly below that designation are not immune from the need for additional workers. Students in culinary programs who have acquired practical skills achieved through hard work in school, extra-curricular involvement, and work outside of school provide a quantifiable potential employee pool. However, many of these enterprises are highly discerning about who enters their ranks. Competition in large metropolitan areas is extremely fierce and subsequently, the chefs who excel in this environment are to a great extent perfectionists. They are willing to teach and see interns as a viable way to acquire a certain level of employee but the entrance standards are extremely high.

From their experience, it will still take time to teach a highly skilled student to be proficient in such an operation. They know students will lesser skills will take much longer to train and the lack of highly honed skills and ability to work independently will invariably present them with several issues they prefer to avoid. First, they would essentially be paying the student to practice since they would be of little use as a productive member of the kitchen. Secondly, experience has also shown that slower workers with lesser skills need constant assistance which disrupts the flow of the operation and frustrates those who can perform at an extremely high level. These chefs also understand their own dispositions and patience is not seen as congruent with performance not yet achieved. These top quality restaurants represent roughly fifteen percent of the nation’s foodservice establishments.

Other restaurants offer good quality but are not quite as stringent in their employee selection and as such, their requirements reflect a more relaxed atmosphere and subsequently more relaxed entrance requirements. They exhibit patience to a point, they will extend opportunities to interns but constant improvement is essential. Many of the restaurants on the lower end of the quality spectrum equally provide good learning experiences to beginning interns. However, it is this genre of restaurants where some foodservice operators are apt to use interns for their own purposes paying them a reduced wage and having little interest in the goals of the intern or the institution.

Organizational training lacks regimentation. Most restaurants do not possess or offer clearly constructed training programs for interns or others for that matter. The element of critical thinking that educational institutions want students to demonstrate in internship portfolios and the like is a difficult, if not impossible, task for the student to accomplish on their own. In the classroom students are guided by the instructor, what is being critically considered is static, and the students’ concentration is centered on that one aspect. When that thought process is completed, they move on to the next area assigned for critical scrutiny. A restaurant does not function like a classroom. Does critical thinking occur in industry? The correct answer is that it does – but in ways that are foreign and indiscernible to the intern who has been groomed in traditional ways of thinking and approaching situations. In busy working restaurants multiple important decisions may be required at one single point in time and decisions thus equate more to properly learned reactions than well-conceived responses. Social capital, the ability to communicate and interact, and symbolic capital, the practical experience that allows interns to learn quickly, become important strengths to possess.

Formal culinary education. As we move into the twenty-first century, more and more of the current chefs have received their culinary education in the university setting. But many of these same chefs have studied at home and abroad with more experienced chef who achieved their knowledge through apprenticeships with other elite chefs in the field. Many of these chefs from the more famous culinary schools do not have academic credentials beyond the associate’s degree. This has and will continue to create a form of divide in an educational sense for still some time to come. More chefs are obtaining bachelor's degrees but it will be some time until they filter into positions of authority in upper strata establishments.

How internship sites convey knowledge. The culinary field continues to become more complicated and populated with professionals better versed in aspect of management, computerization, marketing and so forth. However, in many instances, the transfer of knowledge has remained as it was prior to higher education’s involvement in the field of Culinary Arts. This was expressed by site respondents in various ways but all methods of imparting knowledge expressed by these individuals lead to the same point. Critical thinking in the restaurant setting is conveyed and assessed more so by “demonstrated actions” rather than by constant verbal interaction because the intricate scheme and ways of knowing and conveying occur through the chef’s broad “tacit knowledge.” This is one of the primary reasons students must have a solid plan regarding what they intend to take away from the internship experience – especially in elite and upscale restaurant’s.

It now becomes more evident that the student cannot arrive at the site with no plan of action and simply asks: “What will you teach me?” This is in essence a confounding question to a seasoned chef with many years of experience. Typically, the response resembles: “What did you want to learn?” The different methods of grappling with criticality embraced by student and chef can easily create an initial or sometimes a lasting impasse. Students need direction but in truth, so do the chefs.

The way experienced restaurant chefs convey and assess knowledge became further evident by their lack of awareness of how the institution expected them to evaluate students. When institutions took time to discuss the site’s responsibility regarding the intern’s assessment, the sites were quite willing to comply with the institution’s assessment method. However, those institutions that merely enclosed assessment expectations within the internship documents requiring signatures as verification that the intern was accepted into the site, the knowledge regarding what was required by the site appeared lacking in most instances. There appeared to be an emphasis gap regarding what institutions required from sites in the way of assessment that, in many cases, extended to the point where site’s assumed that the student’s assessment was an institutional issue requiring no site involvement.

Internship Educational Facilitators

Internship facilitators in general spend time where possible evaluating students to discern which sites might be the most beneficial. However, to a great extent they do rely on the opinion of the students’ instructors. In addition to evaluating student laboratory exercises, instructors are also forming other judgments of the students in their care. Instructors are willing and do spend additional time with the slower students to nurture them along, but at the end of the day, those students’ who remain quiet and unassuming, continuously lacks self-confidence, fail to step forward and take a leadership role, and exhibit less than sufficient hand skills are subsequently noted and discussed with other instructors when event participation is the issue. These students are not invited to participate in departmental, university, and community-wide functions.

The department and higher echelon administrators want superior exemplars where potential donors and people of note are involved. Stated differently, a dinner at the University President’s home with important guests present will utilize students with strong leadership, taste profiles, confidence, and accurate and quick motor skills. A weaker student or two may be included to help bring them along, but the event will be executed primarily by a naturally formed inner circle of top student performers with little input from those with lesser abilities and equally less confidence – factors that over time become reinforced in students who have not yet reached their potential. Fairness must be extended to culinary instructors in these instances. They arrive early to teach morning classes, spend the afternoon preparing for the event, and work late to supervise the students’ execution of the dinner. By the time the event begins, they are weary and certainly not eager to interact with less experienced students who need constant direction.

Additionally, though students execute all of the culinary aspects, should mishaps occur, the instructor will receive the blame – the instructor in charge is always responsible for what occurs at university sponsored functions thus instructors are also constantly evaluated both formally and informally. To relate a proper perspective, over the course of study, slower student do ultimately rise to the occasion. They practice to overcome areas of weakness, gain experience working in restaurants, and often demonstrate noticeable improvement during the next school term – instructors note this as well and their involvement in extra-curricular areas increase. Improved performance, where possible, was also lauded and noted by whoever delivers it.

If one extends this mindset to the internship process, it becomes apparent why certain students, “names” that immediately come to mind, receive consideration for the most prestigious internships. These are the student’s who have constantly been involved beyond the curriculum requirements, successfully negotiate different work environments, have the necessary social capital to lead and interact with other, and most importantly, have acquired symbolic capital through demonstrated work related accomplishments. Involvement, environment, social capital, and symbolic capital are obviously not mutual exclusives. The combined use of all must come together to produce achievement in the world of application. While these students typically receive the most coveted internships, some of the lesser known “names” with adequate abilities go unnoticed.

Internship improvement is hindered at the program level. Each internship facilitator expressed a strong interest in students having a good internship experience. They were equally quick to point out that a need for improvement in their internship program exists. Even facilitators at the larger private institution’s with funding for their internship facilitators cite dissatisfaction with elements of the process that were congruent with smaller private institutions. Most of smaller institutions have one internship facilitator who utilizes input from the programs instructors. Larger institutions with up to three full-time facilitators paid year round find themselves in no better position. The issue at hand is the ratio of students to facilitator. Smaller institutions must negotiate the placement of up to two hundred interns per year, primarily during the summer months when students are available to work full time in the industry. Larger institution facilitators with student populations in excess of six hundred students do not in reality face smaller student to facilitator ratios. This severely limits what the facilitator can actually know about any one student. Typically, a quick assessment of the student’s conversational ability and a broad assessment from one or more instructors form the facilitator’s impression of where the student might best fit in terms of site. The lack of real knowledge about the students’ abilities was one of the prime limitations they faced in their opinion.

Students procrastinate the site selection process. Another limitation cited by internship facilitators involved the students themselves. Facilitators felt that students waited too long to begin the internship process. Regardless of whether or not the site was an elite enterprise or not, placement in better internship sites was always highly competitive based on the number of sites available in comparison to the number of students seeking a site. The lack of agency on the part of the student often resulted in the selection process occurring at the last minute with little concern on the part of the student regarding what advantages the site might offer.

A site was needed, the internship is a program requirement, and the thought process did not progress beyond that point. Often these sites were selected by the students’ themselves with the facilitator merely confirming the site’s acceptance of the student. Even site facilitators who accept interns with the intention of "giving back" to the profession reflects a lost opportunity to improve internship learning methods and students' critical assessment and reflection strategies through constructive learning partnerships between educational program and site facilitators. Even if such learning partnerships were in fact constructed, internship facilitators would still have little time to evaluate and reflect on their effectiveness.

A disconnect between higher education administrators and applied programs again surfaced in the form of another limitation expressed by all institution internship facilitators. These respondents felt the lack of understanding exhibited by their university administrators regarding the importance of the internship as a valuable learning experience. This lack of understanding was evident in the insufficient funding for facilitators, some receiving no financial remuneration for their work during the academic term, or during the summer when following up on students involved in internships in the field are educational imperatives. These students are typically away from home, many for the first time, in cities unfamiliar to them. Thus at the very least, concern for their safety alone was seen as an important reason for maintaining contact. But to many administrators, it would appear that what does not occur in the classroom is out of sight, mind, and concern. Facilitators also felt that a certain lack of regard for the internship as a course was also evident. Students receive from one to two credit hours for their internship course which typically entails greater than three hundred hours of physical work, keeping journals, comprising portfolios, and compiling internship reports.

Educational programs lack learning methods. One of the smaller culinary arts programs requires that all students embarking on internships find their own sites. This builds character and improves their ability to take action. Of course, they are provided with a pamphlet which provides guidelines for a successful selection. In the end, this institution sends its student out into the world to negotiate and make selection decision with no constructive evaluation or enlightened input from the program itself. Clearly recounted by this educational facilitator was the feeling that higher education truly envisions the laboratory and experiential setting as a supporting component to the classroom although the facilitator's discussions and constant interaction with industry point to the reverse. As my interviews have indicated, a case exists for depicting higher education as an educational entity that has not yet truly embraced the applied nature of the Culinary Arts discipline or the importance of internships in general. Institutions of higher education consistently defend the importance of learning and knowing and rightfully so.

However, as indicated in various ways by all respondents of the study, learning in the form of application, although conducted within the walls and under the auspices of these same institutions, remains an example of “repetitive” learning, regarding university practice. Achievement at the student level is driven by boards of education and thus university administrations that maintain a status quo mindset requiring instructors to ‘do things the way they have always been done’ although economic realities and competitive forces point the need enhanced educational ways of thinking about how best to truly prepare student for working world realities.

How the Findings Informed the Research Questions

The research questions I posed were illuminated by the study. Do all stakeholders involved in internships understand and contribute equally towards the students acquisition of durable knowledge from the internship experience? The answer is no. How each participant: students, internship site facilitators, and culinary program facilitators envisioned and managed their respective roles varied based on their particular perspective and intended ends. The best outcomes were achieved when good planning, and mutual commitment existed between student and internship site. In some cases, there were no well defined goals on the part of all participants. For some students, the internships opportunities were ill-conceived or put together in the hurried fashion that often occurs when scheduling coursework for the following semester.

How do students manage their internship roles? How student stakeholders managed their role in attaining durable knowledge again covered the spectrum. For students, how they initially perceived their individual goals, engaged in aggressive role management, and followed their plan proved to be a recipe for success. Interestingly, novice culinary survey course students who had not yet entered actual culinary classroom and laboratory coursework placed a similar level of importance on utilizing personal agency to achieve intended goals as their successful sophomore and senior counterparts. Thus students indicated their intention to succeed from the beginning. What became evident as the study progressed was the importance of possessing a high degree of social capital to maintain self-belief, build interaction with others to create or be a part of successful networks, and to apply agency to further one's own interests. The acquisition of symbolic capital in the form of practical knowledge proved to be an equally important success determinant because it conveys experience and the ability to extend oneself to gain achievement and of importance in the university setting - notice by their professors who can further their chances for acceptance by prominent restaurants in competitive culinary marketplaces. It is also important to note that students who obtained symbolic capital were less likely to engage in "grade think" assuming that good laboratory execution grades were adequate to successfully perform in the workplace. Thus both forms of capital surfaced as prized components from success in quality-oriented urban restaurants for competitive reasons and the perfectionist perspectives of successful internship site facilitators.

What do internship site facilitators contribute to the internship process? What internship sites were willing to invest in the interns they accepted also varied broadly. For elite restaurant sites, standards were high and acceptance of interns was selective. These sites were willing to commit to the intern and their standards of what defined quality work were high. Some sites focused on providing a worthwhile experience for the students they accepted. At the other extreme, some internship sites brought students in to provide work experience in their kitchens and benefit from reduced labor costs. Thus internship sites ranged the gamut with some selective, some focused on student learning, and those who intended to use students for their own ends.

What were the contributions made by educational facilitators? The involvement of culinary program facilitators in most cases was well intentioned but to some extent restrained due to higher education mandates, maintaining internship site relations, and high student to facilitator ratios. They do their best to achieve a goodness of fit for the student and internship site. However, in many cases, what they actually know about the students they place is insufficient to achieve that perfect match. Try as they may, students unknown to them often receive a signed approval for the internship site and unfortunately little more based on placement volume. Internship facilitators are further hampered in their efforts in terms of follow up and ongoing mentoring during the actual internship because these practical experiences in industry occur during the summer months when facilitators are not under contract with their respective universities and would not be paid to follow student progress. Some facilitators do remain in contact with their students without compensation. I did encounter a situation where the educational facilitator's contact with students was minimal from the beginning of the process up to the evaluation of the student. This culinary program intended for students to find and assess the value of the experience of the sites and make selection decisions. The internship selection process was considered good practice for honing job hunting skills rather than the learning opportunity an internship should provide to the student.

Were the contributions of all stakeholders: the students, educators, and site facilitators considered in judging the student's internship outcome? Again, unfortunately the answer is no. Interns do for the most part bear the sole weight of evaluation. Further, it is not that students innate lack the ability to engage in critical reflection upon their internship experiences but rather a lack of defined criteria and knowledge of how the frame the experience for critical consideration. Educators fail to embed the importance of social skills and the need for practical experience to enhance the value of their culinary education. Stated differently, students often consider a superior grade in laboratory coursework as an adequate level of performance. Those students who achieve strong practical work experience have a much better understanding of what industry requires as an acceptable level of ability.

Do students bear the sole weight of evaluation? The evaluation process is also marginally constructed and students are generally the only stakeholders evaluated. Internship site facilitators were vague regarding evaluation requirements and who was responsible for stating those ends. An additional barrier students face involves a disconnect in the discipline terminology used in culinary program coursework versus the way information is conveyed in the workplace. As the literature indicates, the education of site facilitators ranges from apprenticeships to what is becoming a more university oriented culinary education. Still, many site facilitators have no more than an associate degree. Thus, in many cases, knowledge conveyance occurs in the form of demonstrating desired skills rather than verbally and the student is left to extract knowledge through social skills and careful observation.

Do all students obtain durable knowledge during their internships? In sum, the answer is no. What students learn is based on proper planning, desire, commitment, social skills, practical experience, and of the greatest importance, bring all of these elements to bear place students in the best position to achieve their desired goals from the internship experience. Thus, what the student will learn is truly a function of their desire and ability and the commitment of the internship site. Many sites facilitators contribute admirably while quite a few do not know how to best aid the student to achieve durable learning. Still others are attending to their own agenda and have little interest in nurturing the student. The consistent achievement of durable knowledge remains, based on a variety of situations culinary education has failed to address and control, a work in progress.