DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A TEACHING-LEARNING SEQUENCE ABOUT CELIAC DISEASE IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CLASSROOMS

Celiac disease (CD) is a systemic immune-mediated disorder caused by gluten and related prolamins in genetically predisposed individuals. People suffering this disorder (1-2% of the population) must avoid gluten in diet. Even if it seems to be easy, celiac people is frequently misunderstood and the poor knowledge of society worsens their quality of life. Celiac children are especially vulnerable. It´s important to make efforts in order to integrate them completely in the school and friends group and guarantee them a proper physical and psychological grow up. Then, enhancing the knowledge of children about these limiting disorders would affect the integration and quality of life of this collective.

Both Primary Education (PE) graduates and Human Nutrition and Dietetics (HND) graduates have the responsibility to give nutritional education among children and society. Nevertheless, these students do not commonly develop this competence during the Degree. Therefore, it is interesting to carry out multidisciplinary and collaborative projects during the Final Year Dissertation (FYD) that make students put together the capabilities of both professionals on this social responsibility.

Following this idea, in the previous course (2015-2016), students from PE and HND Degrees from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) collaboratively developed an inquiry-oriented teaching-learning sequence (TLS) that aims to introduce elementary students and teachers to CD and gluten free diet (GFD). Scientific contents were adapted to the cognitive capability of children and laboratory experiments were designed to make them learn about gluten and GFD through an interactive workshop performed during one day at the university laboratories. This first approach was successful, as demonstrated by the results obtained in the questionnaires filled in by the students before and after the activity. In this course (2016-2017), we adapted the TLS to the primary school classroom , in order to design useful material that can be worked at schools in an autonomous way (i.e. without experts support).

The adapted TLS consisted of an interactive talk with classroom response systems about gluten and CD and a number of collaborative experimental activities in the classroom, following an inquiry-based learning approach (sensory analysis of gluten containing and not containing bread, interpretation of the label information of different food products and cosmetics, comparative analysis of different cereals flours, and detection of gluten in biscuits with immunocromatographic columns). The TLS offers a student-centered approach in which the teacher plays the role of supervisor, seeking to encourage the development of scientific competences and to facilitate the significant learning about gluten and GFD concepts. Before and after the intervention, students fulfilled a questionnaire in order to detect any change in their comprehension of the topic. Questionnaires responses were statistically analyzed (by McNeman or Wilcoxon tests). Results were positive in terms of identification of potential gluten containing foods and in the comprehension of the concepts such as “gluten” and CD, among others.

These results confirmed the success of the designed TLS, and highlighted the usefulness of developing collaborative projects during the FYD. The TLS could be implemented at any primary school autonomously with simple material.