Contemporary Art Practices in Preservice Teacher Education: Using Conflict Kitchen in a College Art Methods Course

In this article, Jaehan Bae describes one of the assignments he created for an art methods course for education majors (preK-8). In it, Bae asked preservice teachers to research the food as well as other aspects of a culture of their choice. Through this assignment, he hoped the preservice teachers would "explore art and the world through multiple senses/lenses and develop democratic behavior as an engaged citizen, and recognize international connections through art and contribute to world peace" (Bolin & Hoskings, 2015, p. 42). In this article, Bae describes the assignment and its implementation, including some of the resulting research and analyses generated by the preservice teachers in his class. He also offers suggestions for other art educators who might wish to implement a similar project with education majors to achieve similar goals. The primary external resource for this assignment was a project known as Conflict Kitchen. Conflict Kitchen (2010-2017) originated in 2010 as a pop-up takeout restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; it served a menu of foods from countries engaged in diplomatic and military conflicts with the US (Haines, 2015).