“An unexploited potential” LifeLab Food and Health: Assessment and Development of Teaching and Learning Practices in the Norwegian School Subject Food and Health

Abstract

Adhering to a healthy diet is key to a healthy life. Furthermore, investing in child and adolescent health has been highlighted as particularly important since it benefits the individual both now and long-term, as well as future generations. Based on this, schools have been identified as a crucial arena to reach this age group. In Norway, the school subject termed Food and Health (FH) educates students in food and nutrition and how this is related to health. Still, there is concern students are not acquiring the competencies highlighted in the curriculum since the number of formally qualified in FH is the lowest among all school subjects. Also, FH classes today primarily focus on cooking and the development of students’ cooking skills, leaving little time for more comprehensive FH education, which contributes to this concern. The aims of this thesis were twofold: first, to map teaching practices in FH in Norway, at the national and school levels, with special emphasis on learning activities, teacher competence, and experiences among FH teachers and students in Norway; second, to develop and test different student-activating learning tasks aiming to strengthen comprehensive FH education. This thesis has been based on four papers. In Papers I and II, an anonymous online questionnaire was developed and distributed to all primary and lower secondary schools in Norway to map FH teachers’ teaching practices, formal competence, and experiences at the national level. In Paper III, focus group discussions (FGDs) with teachers and students were conducted to explore current teaching practices and their experiences of the subject at the school level. The findings from these FGDs, together with the literature on pedagogics, were then used to develop the learning tasks. Finally, for Paper IV, the developed learning tasks were tested at three schools recruited for the project using video recording and observation to collect data.