Abstract:

Home economics (HE) is a practice-oriented school subject which expects students' active involvement and where students deal with topics strongly intertwined with everyday life themes. Although, with the digital era within the last decades, new challenges have arised - e.g. how to implement digital technology into subject teaching in a pedagogically meaningful way? Moreover, the COVID-19 lock-down showed that in many countries especially home economics teachers faced new challenges when trying to give independent learning tasks for students at home. It was difficult to instruct as well as to evaluate students' food preparation skills from a distance, and learning skills related to sensory evaluation was practically impossible.

In this article, we share the experiences of a joint Erasmus+ strategic collaboration project NAVI-HED (Navigating through digital challenges in Home economics education) that united university researchers and expert practitioners, working as HE subject teachers, from four Nordic-Baltic countries. As an innovation, expert practitioners from each partner country (n=12) were included through the Delphi technique for mapping good practices and ideas that worked well during the lockdown period.

The expert teachers were included into the project in four rounds composing the methodology in this project:
(1) describing their practices;
(2) voting for the most promising practices;
(3) developing the ideas further with the researchers, making them more detailed and versatile;
(4) evaluating the final material.

The product of this project is a booklet of pedagogical ideas from practitioner to practitioner, that supports students’ independent learning in HE distance education. Including the expert practitioners in several rounds of the development enabled to raise the quality and workability of the material. However, there were also challenges between different parties: e.g. having different expectations for the details of the content or the form of presenting the final material. We hereby open the viewpoints of both parties on the methodology and cooperation process as well as share our experiences in using Delphi technique for empowering the process and the project results through know-how of the expert practitioners.

Keywords:

Delphi technique, developmental project, home economics.