Abstracts Economics

Moniammatillinen ruokakasvatus yhteisöllisenä toiminta- ja oppimisprosessina : Jaettuun ruokatajuun kytkeytyvä analyysi: Multi-professional food education as a collaborative action and learning process : An analysis based on shared food sense

by Ida Volotin

The purpose of this study is to find out what kind of tensions school actors experience and bring up as a part of the multi-professional collaborative planning and action process related to food education. In addition, this study is interested in what kind of collaborative learning is built based on these tensions. These results are conceptualized using levels of shared food sense. The study examined the collaboration process between three subject teachers and the school's food-service manager, during which a theme day for the whole school “environment friendly food day” was planned, implemented, and evaluated. So far, there has been no similar research in Finland on cooperation between food service and teaching staff or the utilization of school meals as a multidisciplinary learning entity in school communities. This study aims to respond to this research gap, as the national recommendations covering school meals (2017) and the Finnish National Curriculum (2014) guide and recommend the school community to consider school catering more widely as part of food education and multi-professional collaboration. This study was part of the RUOKATAJU (2020–2022) project. In this study data included multi-professional meetings, the teachers' open feedback questionnaire and interviews. The analysis was theory-based and utilized the definition of shared food sense and tensions. Collaborative learning was noticeable in relation to planning the ”environment friendly food day” implementation through joint understanding. Instead, the tensions that appeared during the evaluation phase provided appropriate information about the challenges related to the cooperation between the food service and teaching staff. Tensions were related, for example, to the hectic work of the food service staff, the staff resources provided by the employer, the diversity of the teacher's work, lack of information about school meal practices, the lack of professional competence or meaning. When considering further research ideas, it would be worthwhile to also make the voice of principals and the food service industry heard.