The Alchemy of Teaching and Learning: Brewing as a Metaphor for Transformative Learning
 

The Alchemy of Teaching and Learning: Brewing as a Metaphor for Transformative Learning

Dr. Jessica Riddell (English) & Dr. Dale Wood (Chemistry) 

Beer is a striking metaphor for transformative learning

The metaphor is deceptively simple: professors are metaphorical brew masters. Both gather together a set of ingredients and combine them with (hopefully) profound and transformative results. The four ingredients in beer (water, malted grain, hops, and yeast) share corresponding (metaphorical) ingredients that professors have at their disposal to create conditions for transformative learning – for students and for themselves.

In the following metaphor, we suggest that:

  1. water is the learning environment
  2. malted grains represent the students
  3. hops represent a liberal education
  4. yeast is a metaphor for knowledge

Bishop’s University combines all these ingredients, often with intoxicating results.

The Alchemy of Brewing and Teaching

First, let’s situate the role of the brew-master-as-professor within a historical context of beer making.

Beer and Brewing have existed for thousands of years, and the drive to perfect the perfect beer is one of the earliest scientific pursuits. Long before the alchemical search for the Philosopher’s Stone – which reputedly turns base metals into gold – brewers had already turned water, grain, and herbs into liquid gold.
Brewers were the first alchemists, constantly experimenting to improve their product but also attributing what they could not explain to divine intervention. Brewing was almost exclusively under the jurisdiction of priests and priestesses, and the process of converting herbs and grains into a drink that created euphoria (and often hallucinations!) was a mystical and miraculous transformation that could only – the theory went – be a gift from the heavens. Brewing was considered a divine art as much as it was a science of crafting beer.

Professors, like brew masters, are craftsmen who gather together raw materials and create conditions that encourage transformative processes, with sometimes ineffable results. We have all witnessed our students combine preparation, hard work, and learning with a touch of magic and a flash of insight in order to make sense of the world around them in a new way. That joy of discovery is often what drives us as teachers and as learners.
Now, in an ideal world, the brewer or the professor could replicate the same combination of ingredients and conditions to create a great batch of beer or an awesome learning experience every single time.

If only it was that easy! This is where the alchemy comes in, and the humble awareness that we are only conduits of a process that we cannot always control … but from which we can always learn.

Bishop's Brewery - Chemistry Department

Get Thee to a Brewery: The Ingredients of Transformative Learning

Brewing water is the learning environment

Water provides the medium in which the beer is produced, much like the learning space is the area in which teaching and learning occurs.
The water that brewers use is so much more than just H2O. Water is critical to beer’s production, but it is the mineral content of the water that has a critical role to play in the character of the beer.  If you want to produce a dark, rich ale, use hard water rich in Calcium and Sulfate. A clear, crisp pilsner requires soft water containing Sodium, Potassium, and Chloride. The minerals present in the water also provide yeast with essential nutrients for healthy growth.

Like water, the learning environment has a critical effect on learning outcomes. We try to create ideal learning conditions in the classroom and beyond, through lectures, experiential learning, flipping the classroom, scaffolding assignments and a diverse range of activities to help students develop core competencies. Research suggests that even the layout and architecture of the learning environment changes the dynamics of learning.

Students are malted grains

Grain (barley, wheat, rye, oats, etc.) is the primary ingredient in beer. All beer is made from it. However, before grain makes its way to the brew house, it must be malted. The first step in malting is the process of germination, by which the grain kernel (a seed) is activated by steeping it in water to initiate growth of a new plant (in our metaphor, immersing students in the learning environment allows the grain/student to open up to the chemical changes of brewing/learning). Hydration of the grain generates enzymes that break down the outer husk of the grain, making it more receptive to the chemical processes it will undergo. Finally, the grain is exposed to heat in a process called kilning. This produces even more chemical reactions that release colour and distinct flavour compounds in the grain that are prized by the brewer.

If we understand this process as a metaphor for learning, a student is immersed in the learning environment (i.e. placing the grain in water to germinate) and then given various challenges – and even pressure (the kilning process) – to bring out the best in that particular student. Each grain, like each student, responds differently to different levels of heat (and pressure), but ideally the brewer/professor can create conditions that encourage the grain to “activate” and change in such a way as to bring out the finest flavours – or greatest capacity – of that particular grain.
Just as malted grains provide the fundamental building blocks of the brewing process, students are the driving force for teaching and learning. Grains provide the essential energy, in the form of sugars, for yeast (knowledge) to work its magic: concomitantly, students often they provide us with the energy to continue striving for pedagogical excellence to help them reach their fullest potential while at Bishop’s.

Hops represents a Liberal Education

Although beer has been brewed for at least 10,000 years, hops is a fairly recent addition as an ingredient. It has always been common practice in brewing to add flavour and aroma additives – such as local herbs or flowers – but today beer without hops is a rarity.

Although the antiseptic and preservative qualities of hops were known by the latter part of the 11th century A.D., its use in brewing is believed to have begun quite a bit later, likely in the 13th century. By the early part of the 16th century hops were a standard ingredient in beer, particularly on the continent. Germany even made a law in 1516 that hops had to be an ingredient in beer (the law was called Reinheitsgebot, the German Purity Law).

Why are hops so important? Because – in addition to the myriad of flavours it infuses into the beer – hops improves the shelf life of beer from weeks, to months or even years under the right conditions. Coinciding with the advent of exploration and colonization in the late middle ages, the introduction of hops ensured that adventurers and conquerors could take beer with them for long journeys across oceans to new worlds.

How do hops connect with a liberal education? Just like beer doesn’t need hops, a university can operate without a liberal education approach. However, some research suggests that the quality of the education and the mechanism for its delivery is much improved if it does, and the beer (i.e. transformative knowledge) lasts longer and can be better preserved.

Last but not least: Yeast

If water is the learning environment, malt is the student, and hops is a liberal education, then Yeast is knowledge itself.

Brewer’s Yeast (Saccharomyces Cerevisiae) is a single-celled microorganism that lies dormant until the brewer pitches it into his wort.

The wort is the sugary, nutrient packed, hoppy solution prepared from water, malt, and hops. In this metaphor, the wort represents the entire learning environment (receptive, enthusiastic students in a liberal education university like Bishop’s!). The only thing missing is yeast – the knowledge – to activate the entire process and create magic.

When you add yeast, the brewmaster might cross their fingers and even utter a few prayers since the brewer can never be exactly sure what effect the yeast will have. Since yeast is a living organism, it can be very fickle. If the nutrients aren’t just right, or the temperature in the fermenter varies too much, or any one of the multiple conditions aren’t – or couldn’t! – be accounted for, you are not going to get the desired result.

In some cases something wonderful happens and you produce a masterpiece of liquid gold. However, sometimes the batch fails and you have to start over. The batch can also become contaminated by an outside agent such as bacteria or wild yeast.

The brewer wages a constant war against contamination and a multitude of other factors in their pursuit of the best product – as does the professor.

We are constantly faced by challenges to learning – including all the outside stresses on our students (finances, mental health, personal struggles, bullying, substance abuse, you name it!). Sometimes there are students we can’t seem to activate despite our best efforts to “germinate” them. There are some variables that are outside our control, which can be somewhat daunting – but if you take an alchemy approach and understand that you are merely the conduit through which transformative power is possible, then these challenges can be less trying and more exciting.

As yeast consumes what the brewer gives it, it grows and multiplies, just as knowledge begets more knowledge. The yeast recovered from one batch can be reused to ferment another. Knowledge also comes alive when it is provided with the ideal conditions of the wort (active and engaged students, a liberal education approach, and a hospitable learning environment).

Another interesting thing about yeast is that it has to be put under stress to produce a layered and complex beer. When we exert (safely controlled) pressure on our students – for example, by challenging them with greater responsibilities and autonomy in their own learning process – it can yield greater results as they rise to meet these challenges. Not doing so results in a bored little yeast cell, full and growing, but never reaching its greatest capacity. The brewer really needs to be careful here though; too much stress can kill the yeast. [Author’s note: every article we’ve read suggests killing students is bad for retention.]

The TLC Brew Crew

Knowledge production and knowledge dissemination – in the realms of brewing and higher education – requires a healthy balance of humility, risk taking, and a lot of hard work. In brewing, this means trying new combinations of ingredients, switching to a different mineral profile in the water, placing your yeast under unexplored stresses, or any number of other deviations from the traditional recipes of the past. The result may be a flop or it may result in something delightful. It’s the same in teaching. Every professor, like every brewer, has their “go-to” recipes. Sometimes deviating from that recipe is a big mistake, but sometimes trying something different results in a new way of looking at things. That’s why participating in the Teaching and Learning Centre (TLC) at Bishop’s can be so rewarding: each professor can explore new ideas – in pedagogical support, educational leadership, or research and publication on scholarly teaching – with a group of faculty who have many different recipes to share!

The very process of writing this article – as a collaborative endeavour between an English literature professor and a Chemistry professor – has been its own transformative learning process. We came to this collaboration with very different areas of mastery (metaphors and matter, respectively), and learned a great deal about transformative learning in the process. We hope you find the final product smooth and refreshing.

Raise a toast to transformative learning at Bishop’s University!