Navigating through Digital Challenges in Home Economics Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Navigating through Digital Challenges in Home Economics Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Pedagogy and didactics; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Teachers of HE education in Nordic-Baltic countries have faced similar challenges in using digital tools in classroom settings. Although digital tools are only one side of the coin, it is important to find methods to implement digital technology into subject teaching in a pedagogically meaningful way. With our previous Erasmus+ funded LEAD project (Learning and Digitalization in Home Economics), we collaboratively developed teaching materials to help HE teachers implement digital tools into HE lessons. This NAVI-HED project goes a step further. It aims to collect and disseminate best practices to support educators in the field of HE so that they can obtain the knowledge and skills to use digital tools in a pedagogically supportive way in the context of distance/blended teaching. The experience with COVID-19 in spring 2020 showed that teachers, especially in HE, faced new challenges when trying to provide independent learning tasks for students at home. HE education includes practical activities, such as planning, making, serving and evaluating food. It is difficult for teachers to provide relevant instruction for students with different background knowledge and skills, to evaluate the outcomes and to give suggestions without face-to-face contact. It is expected that there will be a need to apply distance/blended teaching methods in the future, even when the COVID-19 pandemic is over. Students who are unable to participate in classroom activities for various reasons need to have access to distance learning methods. Therefore, the longer term benefit of this project is to provide all students with equally high-quality education, whether they are in the classroom or at home.
Our target group in this project is comprehensive school HE teachers in Estonia, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The project has three stages: First, we study the topical scientific literature to raise participants’ knowledge as well as to close the gap between practitioners and scientists. Second, we use the Delphi method to collect pedagogical ideas for distance/blended learning situations. We believe that practitioners have valuable experiences, and therefore we include expert HE teachers (three from each partner country) in this project to determine best practices. Third, we introduce the developed manual of pedagogical practices and ideas in each participating country on a teachers’ seminar day and distribute the knowledge among a wider audience.
As a result of the project, teachers will be introduced to the pedagogical manual—a useful product with at least 16 different pedagogical ideas or practices in their own native language for implementing HE education in distance/blended learning as well as explanatory text and analysis of the experiences. It is expected that having access to a variety of ideas will increase teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and thereby better prepare them in case distance teaching is needed. In addition, the ideas in the pedagogical manual can be adapted for HE classroom activities and special education classrooms. The developed materials can also be used by other subject teachers to obtain valuable ideas.
The NAVI-HED project joins together the leading HE teacher educators and researchers from four participating countries (12 members total). We saw in our previous LEAD project how beneficial it is to exchange knowledge and experiences in the Nordic-Baltic region. Ideas for successfully navigating the digital challenges of the present context is shared, while also recognizing that digital methods will surely gain a permanent role in the pedagogic toolbox of the HE teachers. Although the area of HE education is quite small in each country, it has significant potential that has not yet been fully exploited. We need to share experiences within our Nordic-Baltic team, since every participating institution has their own specific knowledge that cannot be found in the other countries.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 77938 Eur

Project Coordinator

TALLINN UNIVERSITY & Country: EE

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITETET I AGDER
• HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
• GOETEBORGS UNIVERSITET