Meet Jonathan Burton, Professor of English
"Our students are caring, creative, and fun. Whittier students always have each other’s backs. I learn with and from them every day. Because professors at Whittier get to know our students so well, we are invested in and dazzled by our students’ growth. If you come to a commencement ceremony at Whittier College, you’ll see faculty and students hugging like family members. And that’s because we are a kind of family."
How does your love of cooking figure into your teaching?
In my “Eat Your Words: Food, Culture, and Writing” course, students experience the full menu of food writing—in blogs, magazine articles, food memoirs, Instagram posts, reviews, recipe-centered pieces, cookbooks, and short fiction—and create stories in a variety of these forms. We learn through our senses, training our palates and growing our imaginations through in-class cooking and tasting labs and visits to a local farmer’s market. Building on this embodied knowledge, we grow our skills of description to fully capture in words what foods taste like, whether surprising and new or nostalgic, comforting or culturally affirming.
Tell us about one of these tasting labs.
One of our labs takes the form of an Open Mic Tamalada. As I’ve learned from my colleague José Orozco, tamaladas are occasions for gathering together family and friends to collaboratively make tamales and affirm cultural bonds. In our version, students make tamales side-by-side with food writers from places like The LA Times, LAist, and LA Taco who also join our students in open mic storytelling focused around our experiences with food, family, and cultural identity. They explore the tensions between perceived obligations to affirm cultural identities (i.e. follow family recipes) and our desires to evolve and express emerging identities. But our goals are not entirely intellectual. All of the “lab” days are designed to build community and create opportunities for students to learn from one another.
Describe a couple of assignments you give that really resonate with students.
In my professional writing class, students write grant proposals for an on-campus grant program that can actually fund their ideas. Students are developing a crucial skill (grant writing) while also learning about and advocating for their own campus community. In my graphic novel class, students write about how they would transform their own story into a graphic novel. This project allows students to apply what they have learned over the course of the semester to an area where they are the unquestioned experts.
How do you and your faculty colleagues engage with students outside of the classroom?
Many of us eat lunch four to five days a week in the Campus Inn, alongside our students. This means we are joking around and learning about their lives informally almost every day. In addition, we sometimes enjoy lunch outings at local restaurants, walks to the farmer’s market, live performances around greater Los Angeles, and cheering together during Whittier athletics events. I recently went kayaking with 40 Poets on Alamitos Bay. Our group included first years and seniors, basketball players and newspaper editors. It was a real cross-section of Whittier students, joined by three professors and our Director of Wellness.
