One aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals is quality education. Not only should education work in favor of sustainable development on a global level; quality education needs to be sustainable in the sense that it provides opportunities for students’ learning in relation to the subject taught.
The school subject Home Economics (HE) is often described as having cooking as a core feature. Consequently, HE-teacher education commonly includes practical cooking as a central part of the content. During the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, educational preconditions suddenly changed, and possibilities for undertaking cooking on campus became limited. In this study, we investigate HE-teacher educators’ experiences of adjusting practical cooking activities during the covid-19 pandemic. The aim is twofold: first, to highlight how the pandemic situation has been tackled in Swedish HE-teacher education. Second, to contribute to the understanding of practical cooking as a part of sustainable HE-teacher education.
In Sweden, there are four universities that offer HE-teacher education. Educators from these four universities were interviewed digitally in focus groups in two rounds. The first round was held in October 2020, the second in April/May 2021. The interviews followed a semi-structured design, and questions were asked about what the pandemic had meant for practical cooking activities in terms of problems, solutions and insights for the future. The interviews are analyzed using thematic analysis, and preliminary results show e.g. how educators used digital solutions, making the education accessible despite new restrictions. These solutions did not necessarily affect students’ possibilities to achieve formally stated learning goals, but there was a hesitation concerning whether tacit and situated aspects of learning was lost when physical encounters did not take place. In short, the results evoke new insights regarding what constitutes sustainable education for HE-teachers of today.