A Peek at the Canvas: March
by Frank Caracciolo
The most recent episode of The Blank Canvas with Frank Caracciolo is out now. Released on November 15thth, the episode features a conversation with teacher and chef Daniel Vanson about teaching the culinary arts.
Frank Caracciolo: Welcome back to the Blank Canvas podcast. Today, we’re going to be meeting with Daniel Vanson. He works over at Pierrefonds Community High School and he’s into the culinary arts. We’re going to explore that and talk a little bit about his program.
He’s here. Let’s get started.
I’m here with Daniel Vanson and he is coming to us from Pierrefonds Community High School. Hey, Dan, how’s it going?
Daniel Vanson: Great. How are you?
Frank Caracciolo: I’m doing well. Can you just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your background and your years teaching with Lester B. Pearson?
Daniel Vanson: Yeah. So my name is Daniel Vanson, and I’ve been working at Lester B. Pearson for 16 years. Now I started off at Lester B. Pearson as an integration aid and substitute teacher. I did that while I was in school and then I worked full time as a teacher. I’ve worked as a alternative teacher, starting at CFER for several years, and then I also now work at PC as the WOTP teacher as well as the culinary teacher. So that’s sort of my professional background within the board. And then personally, I do a lot of cooking as well. I run a cooking page. It’s called a Canadians cooking on Instagram, Facebook, where I really tried to share my passion for cooking with others and that’s what sort of led me to also being the culinary teacher here at PCHS.
Frank Caracciolo: Tell us a little about the program, how it works and how do students get into the program?
Daniel Vanson: Yeah. So we we’re really lucky here at PCHS, I have to say… There’s a lot of support for culinary programs here amongst the whole staff, I’m really, really blessed for that and we have a lot of different avenues to sort of enter our kitchen space. If you’ve ever been to PC, the kitchen space is a beautiful space that we have, that that could fit a lot of students. So we wanted to figure out over the last few years how are we going to maximize that.
So, uh, one thing that we have is in our curriculum, we have a grade 9 and 10 cooking, and then in grade 11, we have a gourmet cooking class. So, it’s sort of a little bit of a chain there, right? The kids can join the program at any time. But you know, the kids that I have had now, you know from grade 9 to grade 10 and then from grade 10 to grade 11, they do sort of have that progress of learning. Will those sort of be learning on different skills and being able to expand on their skills.
And if they’re new, when you get dropped into the course, we still do a basic review in the beginning. You know, they sort of just pick it up and start moving across the program. But I think what really makes our school special is actually the ECA programs that we run also in our kitchen. So, I think we’re the only one in Montreal, but we… I started a BBQ club here at PCHS. So that’s a club that runs weekly after school and it focuses on open fire cooking. Year round, so once a week after school we have about 20 kids registered and they do open fire cooking. We start at 2:30. We’re done at like 5. It’s a really fun experience.
