Out-of-field teaching and home economics: Incidence and impacts: Global insights from the field

Out-Of-Field-Teaching (OOFT) is increasingly prevalent as teacher shortages reduce the availability of qualified teachers in a range of subject areas. In Australia, teacher shortages in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) field has long been acknowledged; however, there are workforce gaps in many subject areas, including home economics and related fields, such as food and nutrition, textiles and health. Teacher shortages are not confined to the Australian context. Global shortages are a challenge identified by UNESCO as a critical factor impacting the capacity to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education by 2030 (UNESCO, 2016). The demand and supply of qualified home economics teachers in Australia is not a new problem. Pendergast and colleagues (2000) highlighted more than two decades ago some challenges and implications for the home economics discipline including: OOFTs lacking expert knowledge, pedagogical content and skills; workplace health and safety concerns; a lack of identity and misunderstanding of the discipline area such as assessment processes, practices and theories—all of which may negatively impact student learning, teacher effectiveness and student access to expert role models. As the home economics field faces challenges such as a lack of specialist programs to educate in-field, OOFTs are more likely to be a feature of home economics classrooms, hence the impetus for this current investigation. In order to explore the OOFT phenomenon in home economics at a global level, a two-stage process was followed: 1) a Systematic Quantitative Literature Review (SQLR) was conducted to identify the informing literature; and 2) an online survey was administered. 470 respondents from 14 countries completed all questions in the survey, of whom 440 were teachers in schools.