Abstract:

Social Responsibility (SR) is a transversal competence for undergraduates and graduates that has been insufficiently and irregularly addressed in the curricula in most of the Degrees and Masters. Likewise, research teams must put into practice this competence and reflect about the SR they belong to. The Laboratory for the Analysis of Gluten (LAG) works in the detection of gluten in foods and the assessment of nutritional status and dietary balance of celiac population. The LAG incorporated a new working line about Nutritional Education that aims to increase the knowledge of the disorder, as well as of the balanced and sustainable feeding of celiac people, but also of the general society.

As a result of this line of work, and keeping celiac and gluten as a common thread, the LAG has designed material for two target populations: families with children and schools. For the elaboration of this material, students developing their Final Master Dissertation (FMD) joined the team in order to work this competence during their training.

Here we describe the school-oriented material: an Inquiry-oriented Teaching Learning Sequence (TLS) about celiac and gluten for children from the last years of Primary Education. This TLS consists of a notebook for the teacher, a notebook for the student, and various laboratory and audiovisual items for the activities. The material has been designed to be carried out during a school day (3h), in a classroom with audiovisual resources and access to nearby running water.

The TLS begins with a brief interactive talk. Key questions will be asked to determine the children's prior knowledge and first doubts about what gluten is, where it is, and what happens to the celiac person will be clarified. Afterwards, the students will work in groups, in the following four workshops, answering some questions in their respective notebooks. In this way, students will learn by themselves, handling the materials and carrying out meaningful learning:

- Making doughs. They must make three different doughs, only one of them being a gluten-containing dough, describing their differences and washing them under a stream of running water to see an elastic gluten residue.
- Sensory analysis. They will compare a regular product with gluten and its gluten-free counterpart, reflecting on the technological function of this protein.
- Food labeling. They will learn to identify gluten-free sure products. They will also reflect on the presence of gluten in other commonly used products, as well as on cross contamination.
- Gluten detection. The qualitative detection of gluten by means of immunochromatographic strips is proposed, where gluten causes the appearance of in a color mark on the column.

The results of the pilot implementation in two schools of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain) have allowed improving and adapting the TLS to the needs of the children and the classrooms, resulting in an attractive, effective and complete material that can be used in a self-sufficient way by any education professional.

We believe that enhancing the knowledge and sensitivity of children about celiac would influence in the integration and quality of life of this collective. Thus, it is important to make efforts in order to spread scientific work to general population.

Besides, the fact that this project was carried out by students in their FMD is an important added value, as it allows students to embrace the concept of professional ethics and responsibility.

Keywords:

Nutrition Education, Celiac Disease, Gluten, Social Responsibility.