Text Analysis for Introduction of Life Cycle Thinking to Home Economics

Abstract

Objective. The objective of this study is to comprehend how much environment-related issues are dealt in the current home economics in full detail to examine the possibility of introducing Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) into curriculum of home economics. The authors applied text mining to plural home economics textbooks from the elementary school to the high school to clarify the difference of use of the environment-related elements - “sustainable society”, “LCA” etc. In addition, the difference among schools and publishing companies were also analyzed.
Results and Discussion. “Daily life” and “family” were the main topic of elementary school and “environment” was also included in it and “environment” was strongly connected with word “think.” In junior high school, “environment” was treated in the family life in the community and had a tendency to be connected with consumption behavior in real life. In high school, there were not many words that had strong ties with “environment” and “environment” came to be treated broader in the various issues of whole society. The word “green consumer” was appeared once in the junior high school textbook, and the word “LCA” was appeared for the first time in the high school textbook. Both were seen only just with the explanation of the concepts. While environmental concepts were linked close to concrete daily actions at the junior high school, the link became weakened at the high school. A problem of missing link that environmental education did not lead to behavioral change was implicated.
Conclusions. The current work showed that the textbook or the curriculum of junior high school seemed most appropriate to adopt LCA to promote environmental-friendly actions because “environment” was treated as a close issue as daily activities, especially consumption behaviors. It can be also proposed to increase more practical contents which connect an environment concept to a concrete action in the textbook of the high school where “LCA” was first appeared.