Kilpi Laura, Liikanen Anne & Tiainen Karoliina
Well-being and food: what kind of connection is there between them?
Our didactic development project was all about the connection of comprehensive well-being and food. The topic of our teaching experiment was: Well-being and food – physical, mental and social point of view. As sources we used examples such as nutrition ABC from Martat (Martat, 2021). The comprehensive aim of this project was to develop ways of teaching home economics by internet connection in distance learning and also to develop our own and the pupils’ distance learning and technology skills. The development of distance learning is a topical subject, because the worldwide pandemic caused rapid changes in primary schools and distance learning had to be brought into use at short notice (Ilomäki & Lakkala, 2020). Our topic was given by the upper comprehensive school teacher. The topic was quite wide, so we needed different ideas to experiment with different kinds of teaching methods. Our intention was also to broaden the pupils’ conceptions about the connection of well-being and food so that they could recognize their own resources concerning overall well-being.
Developing hands-on skills
The main part of this didactic development project was to focus on developing the teaching of hands-on skills by distance learning. We wanted to focus on the basic hands-on skills that the pupils need in their everyday life. The hands-on skill was part of the physical well-being field. We wanted to teach the pupils how to handle different kinds of fruit and make a healthy smoothie, so they can take that skill to their everyday life and make healthy snacks. Our teaching method for this was to use a video. We filmed our own teaching video by using the Stop Motion Studio application. This application was free and it was easy to use. The idea is to make stop-motion movies, where the movie is made from photos. We think that it was a very good and simple way to make our own video and it could be used in many different ways, also by the pupils. Here is a link to Stop Motion Studio tutorial video.
Methods and digital applications
We implemented our didactic development project in a class of 7th graders in secondary school. Before teaching, we shared an introductory video with the pupils. In the video, we told who we are and what we are going to do with them. The lesson was 75 minutes long and we were only able to complete it once. The reason was the changing circumstances caused by the pandemic. In this project we utilized the socio-constructivist concept of learning, which focuses on the pupil’s own learning to learn (Kauppila, 2007, 37–39). As teaching methods of the didactic development project, we used group work, inquiry-based teaching, teacher-led teaching, video, and meditation. We also utilized different digital applications and tools which you can see below in Table 1.
Table 1. Our project subjects and the digital applications used.
Opetuskokeilun aihe 🡪 | Hyvinvointi ja ruoka,tarkasteltuna henkisestä, sosiaalisesta ja fyysisestä näkökulmasta | |||||
| Mistä löytää? | Digitaalinen sovellus/alusta: | Henkinen | Sosiaalinen | Fyysinen | Yhteenveto | Palaute |
| Zooom.us | Zoom | X | X | X | X | |
| Prezi.com | Prezi | X | X | X | X | |
| Flinga.fi | Flinga | X | ||||
| Google Play, App Store | Stop Motion Studio | X | ||||
| Canva.com | Canva | X | X | |||
| Google.com/forms | Googe Forms | X | ||||
| Classroom.google.com | Google Classroom | X |
How did we do?
The teaching experiment was successful. The chocolate meditation at the beginning of the lesson calmed the pupils down and they liked it very much, probably because it had a sweet twist;) During the lesson the pupils participated actively and answered our questions and they focused on the Prezi presentation. There was a calm atmosphere in the classroom. The visual and animated Prezi presentation worked well in teaching. In the discussion task, the pupils discussed actively and added answers to Flinga very actively. We used the Stop Motion Studio application to teach the hands-on skill. In that video we demonstrated peeling and chopping of different fruits and the making of a smoothie. Finally, we summarized our subjects in the diagram made by the Canva application. This brought well together all the three aspects of well-being, namely the mental, the social and the physical. The interaction between the teacher and the student in the distance learning experiment remained quite limited because we did not see or hear the pupils very well. Home Economics is a subject that is characterized by an interactive learning environment, so we will need to further develop this area in the future.
References
Ilomäki, L. & Lakkala, M. (2020). Finnish upper secondary school students’ experiences with online courses. Education in the North, 72(2), 73-91.
Kauppila, R. A. (2007). Ihmisen tapa oppia. Johdatus sosiokonstruktiiviseen oppimiskäsitykseen. Jyväskylä: PS-kustannus.
Martat (2021). Ravitsemuksen ABC. Ravitsemus.
(https://www.martat.fi/marttakoulu/ravitsemus/ravitsemuksen-abc)
Stop Motion Studio tutorial video