Purposes:
Over the past 10 years, the number of students who do not have Japanese as their mother language has been increasing. In this globalizing situation, it is considered that “Home Economics education can actively take an important role to instruct everyday life culture since learning food, clothes and housing is related to identity development as well as understanding other cultures” (Hoshino, 2010, p.185). Although practice of multicultural education in home economics has started in Japan (Hoshino, 2015), there is no guidance material for practicing multicultural education in home economics. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to investigate practice of multicultural education in Canadian home economics since Canada is a multicultural country. It was also planned to use the data as fundamental resources in order to develop a guidance booklet for practicing multicultural education in Japanese home economics.
Methods:
British Columbia has kept ‘Home Economics’ as a subject title when most provinces in Canada don’t have ‘Home Economics’ anymore. This research project selected six secondary school home economics teachers in the province of British Columbia and interviewed them. All of them have taught ‘Foods and Nutrition’which is a home economics course most secondary schools in British Columbia offer. The questions were mainly related to how to instruct students with multicultural backgrounds to teach multiculturalism in home economics.
Findings:
Firstly, it was found that the teachers were not instructing a certain food as Canada’s soul food since Canada is such a multicultural country. They talked about some local foods that are grown and consumed a lot in each district. One of the teachers was letting students introduce their own typical home cook meals.
Secondly, the teachers were taking different approaches to have students look at several cultures. One of the teachers had a theme on tea in order to see differences and similarities of tea in the world. Other teacher had food smell in order to understand the relation between food and culture.
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