| Summary: | As a middle school home economics teacher, I teach foods and nutrition to grade
seven, eight, and nine students. I have always strived to find new and innovative ways to
teach nutrition to students in order to help them take nutrition knowledge and transform it
into everyday nutrition practice. I had noticed, recently, that in the academic literature of
other areas of study, the term literacy is frequently being used, for example, health
literacy, ecological literacy, food literacy. I began to contemplate whether nutrition
literacy might be a way to conceptualize the goal of curriculum and pedagogy in nutrition
education. I began a conceptual quest by using health literacy, within the field of
medicine, as my model, as well as, synthesizing the literature in nutrition and in literacy.
The result was a conceptual framework for literacy which I used to elaborate nutrition
literacy. This conceptual framework uses a Venn diagram that highlights the importance
of the overlapping areas of language, action and ecology in designing nutrition literacy
events that eventually lead to nutrition literacy practices for healthy living. The
significance of the resulting conception of nutrition literacy for home economics
educators, who teach nutrition, was then explored particularly focusing on the
implications for curriculum and instruction. The framework has the potential to enlighten
other areas of study that specifically use literacy as a goal. === Education, Faculty of === Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of === Graduate
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