DIY Project

 Friday, February 16^th marked the beginning of Chinese New Year and the Year of the Dog.  Because both of my children were born in China, the Lunar New Year is a holiday that we celebrate.  Typically, transitioning into the New Year, we do traditional activities like spring cleaning, buying new outfits, getting haircuts, and hosting a big feast.  When it comes to Chinese food, we have always been consumers not producers.  Last year, for the feast, we went out to a local Chinese restaurant, and over the previous years we purchased Chinese food from restaurants then served it at home.  One of the most important traditional foods served during the New Year feasts are dumplings. This year with the “instructables maker challenge” looming, I decided to move away from my previously consumeristic tendencies, and to take up the what Peppler and Bender (2013) describe as the orientation to “produce rather than consume” (pg. 24) …and I set out to make 200 of our own dumplings from scratch to serve at our feast! 

According to Peppler & Bender (2013) “maker activities organically invite cross-generational and cross-cultural participation.” (pg. 27) This was true for our dumpling making endeavor, as it became a family and friend affair.  The idea of making a day of it and gathering friends and family is how dumpling making is done in China as well.  Typically friends and family will gather to work together to make dumplings and this togetherness is part of the process. 

            According to a Travel China guide (travelchinaguide.com):  The most important food during Chinese New Year is the dumpling (jiaozi). Made with flour and stuffed with different fillings, dumplings are usually eaten on the Eve. Because their shape resembles the Yuanbao (a kind of money used in ancient times), dumplings are eaten to bring wealth in the coming year. People, typically in northern China, have a custom to stay up on the eve of Lunar New Year to wrap jiaozi before midnight and eat them on the first hour of the Lunar New Year. This is also because ‘jiaozi’ sounds like a word meaning ‘bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new.’

            To begin our DIY adventure, we first checked to see what types of dumpling tutorials were offered on Instructables.com.   We settled on a tutorial that seemed to offer clear directions along with some videos.  I knew that in Chinese cooking typically there aren’t measurements and times for cooking, it is more intuitive and so we found a recipe that was a mix of intuition with some measurement guides.

     With the “recipe” in hand we began shopping at the new International Market located by Kroger.  We found most of the ingredients there except for the ground pork.  After a quick trip to Kroger to pick up the pork, we headed home to begin! 

     We washed then laid out the Chinese chives and realized that we didn’t know how to cut them, so we found a Chinese chive cutting tutorial on YouTube and watched that before we made the first cut.  

We cut them up and then it was time to add the pork to a large bowl, the directions said to add water to the pork until it was soft, so we added little bits of water and stirred until it seemed like the right consistency.  Our tutorial said that it was important to only stir the pork in one direction. Next we cooked four scrambled eggs, chopped green onion, grated ginger, and measured rice wine and soy sauce.

All was added to the pork and then we stirred and stirred until my daughter had the great idea to put the pork mixture in my Kitchenaide!

      Part two was the true test of our DIY gumption… We had to wrap each and every tiny scoop of the meat mixture into a delicate dumpling wrapper and meticulously fold them.  We didn’t know how to do this and again turned to another YouTube video to find a dumpling-wrapping tutorial.  We found a great one and learned three folds, the braid, the triangle and the fan.

     This was not a task for the feint of heart.  It took most of the day.  As friends came and went we taught them the art of folding the dumplings and we got better and better at it until our dumplings looked pretty professional and we were down to making one dumpling every 45 seconds. 

     There are not set times for cooking dumplings.  They are done using the “three boils method”.  This means you add the dumplings to boiling water and wait for the water to boil again with a lid. When it comes to a boil again, you add one cup of cool water and put the lid on again and wait for the second boil. When it boils for the second time you add one more cup of cool water and bring to the third and final boil.  When it begins to boil for the third time, you remove the dumplings and serve with dumpling sauce! Delicious.

     This process wasn’t easy… it was tricky at times--the toughest part was the folding of the dumplings.  This process took some time and lots of “fails”.  Yet, my daughters and I worked through this.  We persisted because making dumplings was important to us. I found it interesting to read about the tensions around fun vs. hard addressed by Blikstein & Worsely (2016). They consider how, “Both Papert and Freire and their disciples were advocating harnessing the passion of the learner to do the hard work needed to master difficult material.” They continue by writing that, “In fact, early constructionists were not interested in pitting serious against playful, but instead finding ways to live at the intersection of the two.” (pg. 4).  This DIY project really was a blending of interest driven work with hard work and persistence for my daughters and me.  At times it WAS hard but we got through it by helping each other and with the support of online resources as our guide

     This interest driven passion for learning so present in DIY project is exactly what is missing from many classrooms today. Yet, where is the room for interest driven work under narrowing standardization? How do teachers motivate kids to get through the hard work without harnessing their passions?  I argue that in many public schools, they don’t.  Rethinking education doesn’t mean throwing out standards, it means getting to the standards in varied ways that include student choice, design, and creativity.  It is up to research and educators involved in maker spaces to show teachers and policy makers the benefits of making in education.  As Blikstein & Worsley (2016) write, “We have the opportunity to give to millions of children a new entry point into the world of knowledge and science, and give them a much richer palette of expressive media for their ideas to come true, creating much more sophisticated ‘objects to think with’. ” (pg. 11)
      An additional benefit to the DIY project was this sense of togetherness that I mentioned earlier.  Having a project drew our family together and created a memory that I am thankful for. This was a great example of how collaborative learning can be, how engaging it is to learn something new when you have a genuine interest in it, and how in this time/place in our society we can teach ourselves to do just about anything if we have an internet connection.  We just have to change our mindset from consumer to producer.