Abstract
This paper explores the role of home economics education in the 21st century. It commences with an explanation of the disruption to the five predicted future global megatrends – globalisation, urbanisation, digitisation, cybersecurity, sustainability – as a consequence of the global Covid-19 pandemic. The place of megatrends framing home economics is explored by presenting a textual analysis of a literacy publication created as an acceleration point for framing the next one hundred years of home economics and underpinned by global megatrends, published prior to the pandemic. Using the Voyant Tool, visualisations of the book Creating Home Economics Futures: The Next 100 Years are presented and compared to other key literary documents informing the field. The paper then turns to the ways in which education and learning have led to the repositioning of home economics as a field and home economics literacy as the key strategy for ensuring the field continues to remain relevant into the future. Priority areas for education include food literacy; individual, family and community well-being; and the reconstitution of the place of the home.
Highlights
On March 11 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) (2020) officially declared a global pandemic
The findings reveal a strong connection to the agenda of the Book – to shape the future informed by the global megatrends
The disruptive force of the Covid-19 pandemic on these predicted futures reveals a series of pivots and, in many cases, an acceleration combined with a redirection of future trends
Summary
On March 11 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) (2020) officially declared a global pandemic. The Godfrey Team (2020) points to the pandemic as a catalyst for the following megatrend shifts: a deceleration from globalisation towards anti-globalism, resulting from the need for local self-sufficiency; a change to urbanisation led by working from home and the need for better-designed living spaces; an even greater acceleration of digitisation to solve problems and remove manual processes; the need for more sophisticated cybersecurity, especially with working-from-home patterns; and a greater focus on sustainability inspired by the visibility of the benefits derived during lockdown periods and the possibility for achieving greater outcomes than expected Much of this change has resulted from what has been coined ‘pandenomics’ Much of this change has resulted from what has been coined ‘pandenomics’ (Petersen & Bluth, 2020, p. 1), which is the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the global economy: a massive, wide-ranging global economic crisis, with economies expected to experience major collapse
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