Abstract:

Home economics as a practical school subject does not necessarily connect with digital learning. Therefore home economics teachers often raise the question if and how to integrate digital tool at all? This paper gives an overview of the international collaboration of teacher educators and researchers of home economics area from 4 Nordic-Baltic countries working in finding innovative ways of using digital tools in home economics lessons. We open the process of the projects, main results as well as challenges. The LEAD-project (Learning and digitalization in home economics education) set home economics education in contemporary schools into the center for integrating students’ previous knowledge and building organized knowledge structures with the help of digital tools. The project had two intertwined intentions. First, to find methods how to effectively use digital technologies in a given subject to promote students learning in a genuine way. Second, we wanted to find innovative ideas for novel student-led learning tasks, which expect students experimenting, knowledge integration and construction. The outcomes of the LEAD-project are freely available electronic materials (in 5 languages) with 12 lesson plans with didactical explanations and learning tasks that help teachers to prepare lessons according to the contemporary needs of the subject. Developed materials were partly tested in contemporary schools to get instant feedback and raise the quality of project results. It is predicted that developed materials will increase didactic possibilities of using ICT for learning as well as help students to deepen their knowledge structures and promote the acquisition of skills and key competences. The result of the project was especially needed and relevant due to COVID-19 crises as teachers were forced to switch on online learning. Although experiencing various challenges, we value the possibility of exchanging the know-how and doing development with colleagues as the future challenges in terms of subject content and teaching methods of the subject area are similar.

Keywords:

Collaborative development, home economics, digitalization.