Project LifeLab Food and Health – Innovative Teaching for the Future: Development of Student Active Learning Tasks for Home Economics Education in the 21st Century

Food and Health, previously referred to as Home Economics, is a mandatory school subject in Norway. It has the unique advantage of giving all students, regardless of their social background, practical skills and knowledge, life skills that are important for their future health. In the LifeLab Food and Health project, we have developed a research-based and innovative teaching programme and evaluated how it is perceived in a school setting in Norway. This teaching programme is for use in Food and Health teacher education, but also in the education of primary and lower secondary school students in the same subject. LifeLab Food and Health consists of learning tasks in which students in the sixth and ninth grades in school gain first-hand knowledge and an understanding of life skills that are important to manage everyday life. In this paper, we present the learning activities developed and how the students experienced them. Examples of such learning tasks are tasks revealing the science behind dietary guidelines and the promotion of a healthy diet through student active tasks. Our aim is to establish LifeLab Food and Health as a “best practice” within master’s education in Home Economics at the University of Agder in Norway.

Modern Aspects of Home Economics Education and Slovenia

Home economics operates in the academic, curriculum and social realms, as well as in everyday life. Due to its multidisciplinarity, it includes and interconnects the contents of different disciplines (e.g., healthy lifestyle, nutrition, dietetics, textiles, home, family, consumption, personal and family economics, design and technology), which are considered in terms of meeting the needs of the individual, family, and society. Home economics education and literacy play an important role in acquiring knowledge and skills that help raise the quality of life of the individual, family, and society. With the development of society, the needs of both the individual and the family are changing; therefore, changes are also needed in home economics education, which is reflected in the updating of the subject curricula. The goals and contents in the curriculum must reflect and meet the needs of the current society and take into account the cultural dependence and social determinism of the home economics field. To a certain extent, the current curriculum of the subject home economics in Slovene elementary schools already includes some content areas that have been recognised as important for meeting the needs of society. These relate to healthy lifestyle, nutrition, health, textiles, consumption, economics, family, environment and sustainable development. Given the perceived needs of society, the use of household appliances, home contents, and first aid should be additionally included in home economics education in Slovenia, and students should be encouraged to develop social and communication skills. It is also necessary to consider the appropriate placement of the subject in the curriculum, as it is necessary to implement home economics education in the entire elementary school education. Doing so will enable the acquisition of knowledge and skills needed in society and, therefore, the appropriate level of home economics literacy of the individual.

The Role of Home Economics Education in the 21st Century: The Covid-19 Pandemic as a Disruptor, Accelerator, and Future Shaper

This paper explores the role of home economics education in the 21st century. It commences with an explanation of the disruption to the five predicted future global megatrends – globalisation, urbanisation, digitisation, cybersecurity, sustainability – as a consequence of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The place of megatrends framing home economics is explored by presenting a textual analysis of a literacy publication created as an acceleration point for framing the next one hundred years of home economics and underpinned by global megatrends, published prior to the pandemic. Using the Voyant Tool, visualisations of the book Creating Home Economics Futures: The Next 100 Years are presented and compared to other key literary documents informing the field. The paper then turns to the ways in which education and learning have led to the repositioning of home economics as a field and home economics literacy as the key strategy for ensuring the field continues to remain relevant into the future. Priority areas for education include food literacy; individual, family and community well-being; and the reconstitution of the place of the home.

I Do, We Do, You Do Home Economics: Explicit Instruction Connecting Content with Ideology

Explicit instruction is a teaching model that demonstrates to students what to do and how to do it. One purpose of ideology is to focus the who, what, when, where, and why of a disciplinary field. Trained home economists make a sustained commitment to the core ideology of home economics. Mechanisms for identifying locally relevant challenges faced by individuals, families, and communities are embedded in the home economics knowledge base. To identify challenges and locate solutions (who, what, when, where, and how), home economics education programmes must actively teach or provide explicit instruction about the ideology that underpins the home economics disciplinary field. Neglecting ideology results in teaching unrelated subjects or compartmentalised content that may dilute connection to the core aims of the home economics’ ‘big picture’. This paper outlines how explicit instruction and embedded home economics ideology have positively impacted perceptions of the discipline amongst professionals who are new to the field. In teaching and learning environments, making home economics ideology visible and reinforced continuously across all content specialisation areas, the author observed that students acquired the words and concepts to explain the importance of home economics to others. Professionals who are new to the field became more confident and passionate advocates for home economics, because they had learnt and appreciated, through explicit instruction techniques, the what, the how to, and the why of home economics. Equipped with the discipline’s core ideology, professionals who make visible the home economics ‘big picture’ (i.e., the why) to others are better equipped to enact real-world applications of home economics that can adapt continuously to meet ever-changing and complex societal needs.

An Analysis of Subject Competencies Applied in the Activity Tasks of the ‘Home Life and Safety’ area in Middle School Technology-Home Economics Textbooks based on the 2015 Revised National Curriculum

The purpose of this study was to analyze two subject competencies (practical problem-solving capability and independent life capability) reflected in the activity tasks included in the ‘home life and safety’ area of 12 middle school technology-home economics textbooks in accordance with the 2015 revised curriculum. The analysis criteria were sub-elements of two subject competencies. Seven sub-elements were derived from each competency. Frequency analysis was performed to determine how often the sub-elements were reflected in the activity tasks. The results were as follows. First, with regard to the sub-elements of ‘practical problem-solving capability’, ‘value judgment’ was reflected most frequently in the activity tasks followed by ‘exemplification of solution’, ‘logical thinking’, ‘critical thinking’, ‘decision-making’, ‘practical reasoning’, and ‘evaluation of solutions’. Secondly, the sub-elements of ‘independent life capability’ were unevenly distributed in the activity tasks. The ‘capability to perform conscious living’ was reflected most frequently followed by ‘development and self-identity’, ‘time, money, and leisure management’, and ‘reasonable consumption and resource utilization’. For teachers wanting to teach activity-oriented classes and student participatory classes, the results pinpoint the materials necessary to develop learners’ subject competencies by using textbooks from different publishing companies.