​Years of experience teaching neurodivergent students helps Meghan Parker and Gamelle FitzGibbon craft recipes that use easy-to-follow illustrations.​

By Liz Mendes, North Shore News

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Carson Graham Secondary teachers Meghan Parker and Gamelle FitzGibbon are the creative thinkers behind 'Cooking Artfully,' a cookbook for visual learners. | Paul McGrath / North Shore News​

With a shared love of cooking and years of teaching experience under their belts, Gamelle FitzGibbon and Meghan Parker found themselves asking a simple question: If students and classrooms have already moved away from teaching kids through dense paragraphs, why are cookbooks still following this pattern?

It was through conversations like this that Cooking Artfully was first developed. FitzGibbon and Parker, two teachers from North Vancouver's Carson Graham Secondary, recently launched the unique cookbook, taking a different approach to the traditional recipe.

The book aims to make the kitchen a more fun and accessible place for neurodivergent people, visual learners and anyone who finds traditional recipe books overwhelming. Cooking Artfully uses comic-book-style visuals and simplified step-by-step instructions to make recipes easier to follow.​

“Traditional recipes ask you to read and remember and execute all at the same time," FitzGibbon said. “When you make a visual recipe like we did, it kind of offloads that burden. So, you don't have to hold all the steps in your head, you can actually see them all at once."

The idea for the book came from their experiences as teachers, FitzGibbon said, watching how struggles with sequencing, processing speed and memory could make cooking frustrating and difficult for some students.

“What you know through education is that people find that sequencing is really difficult," she said. “People don't have that sort of working memory, particularly if they're neurodivergent and they're working with all sorts of other stimuli coming into them…. We found that shift [in recipe style] changed cooking from stressful to calmer and more doable."

While the book was initially aimed for neurodivergent audiences, FitzGibbon said she's been surprised at how its appeal has been larger than expected.

“Accessibility and neurodiversity aren't niche anymore" she said. “When you design for people who need things to be less complicated, we actually found that we improved the experience for everybody."

The cookbook is available for purchase at cookingartfully.com.