A Tailored Food Science Education Program For Primary And Secondary Teachers

Abstract

Although the role of health education is widely recognized in promoting and maintaining of a good health status, it can be noticed that a fairly large proportion of children - youngers and adults - do not express basic knowledge and skills concerning health and food education. In this respect, an important component of health education - nutrition education - seen as a conjunction of various educational strategies, together with a clear environmental support, designed to make easier and with full knowledge the food choices and nutrition related behaviors, with the view to promote health and well-being, becomes “a must” and a real urgency in the process of educating children and teen-agers. Answering to the actual needs concerning the strengthening of the importance of nutrition education in schools, the Erasmus+ European project entitled “Raising the Awareness of the Triad Nutrition-Health-Food Safety in School Education”, proposed a 15-credits teacher training program entitled: “Modern Approaches in Health Education” - consisted of two sections: (a) Innovative Aspects related to Teaching and Learning in Health Education, and (b) Actual Challenges in Food Science - which tried to enrich the primary and secondary teachers’ knowledge concerning food and related issues, to present suitable pedagogical strategies for designing health education activities and to produce didactic materials and guidelines able to sustain the optimal projection of teaching activities. In this sense, the paper tries to illustrate the feedback offered by the Romanian trained teachers, related to the entire training process, expressed at the moment of their graduation.