Nutrition teachers were allocated to each school since 2007, as nutritional education is getting more important. However, nutritional education was not provided properly at most schools and the quality of the education was mostly depend on competency of each teacher because there was no standard manual. Nutrition teachers were also suffering from many difficulties because administrative system did not consider nutrition teacher’s characterized duties. There were several studies to activate nutritional education but there were only few studies improving nutrition teacher’s teaching performance.
Therefore, the purpose of this study was identifying the status of nutrition teacher and to providing fundamental data for improving nutrition teacher’s standard of working by collecting their opinion.
Questionnaires were distributed to and collected from 311 nutrition teachers in national wide elementary, middle and high schools via E-mail from 14th of July to 26th of September in 2014. The questionnaire includes common questions, recognition on work intensity and difficulty, working condition and recognition on nutrition education, training condition, promotion, turnover, payment and incentives.
Most of nutrition teachers recognize that their work intensity is immoderate, so over 20% have experience working overtime more than 20 hours a month. Especially 63.5% of nutrition teachers in high school worked overtime more than 40hours a month.
73% of nutrition teachers provide nutrition education and the percentage of nutrition education decreased meaningfully as it goes to upper level of school. Most of nutrition education was provided in creative activity class. Most of the education was conducted by request of the nutrition teachers. Average nutrition education was 3.73 hours a month with theoretical, practical and experimental education by Internet and visual materials. Teaching materials was acquired from the homepage of Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human service, Korean Dietetic Association and webpage of Dietitians.
Nutrition teachers are suffering from absence of standard teaching materials, instruction and excessive work with regard to nutrition education. Nutrition teachers understand that they need proper arrangement of nutrition teachers with regard to number of students and working condition should be improved and workload should be reduced. Nutrition teachers also think that ideal class time for nutrition education is nutrition curriculum class or creative activity class. Nutrition teachers want 30 hours job training during the vacation every once a year organized by regional Department of Education.
Most of nutrition teachers need promotion and transfer to professions for systematic foodservice and education. Nutrition teachers also need additional allowance for the schools that serve 2 or 3 meals a day.
After considering all the survey result, we reached this conclusion. Improvement of nutrition teacher’s working condition supported by the Ministry of Education and Department of Education is needed for increasing their standard of working as well as systematic nutrition education.