Food in science, science in food - Interdisciplinarity in science/chemistry and home economics' lower secondary curricula across three countries

Food, cooking, and eating are commonly used as contexts or legitimations to teach and communicate science. However, for teaching to have contextual credibility, the relationship between subject and context is a relevant area of study. The present contribution describes an analysis of curricula from three Nordic countries shedding light on conditions for interdisciplinarity and/or curricular integration between the subjects science/chemistry on the one side, and home economics on the other. A two-phase documentary analysis was conducted on curricula from Finland, Norway, and Sweden from 2006 to 2020, revealing substantial potential for interdisciplinary collaboration and/or curricular integration. This is seen both in common declarative knowledge content ('declarative knowledge overlap') and, more interestingly, meeting points between subject-dependent practices and ways of thinking ('transfer of practices and ways of thinking'). The second inductive phase produced 11 themes common to the subjects. Possibilities and challenges are discussed in relation to the subjects' epistemologies and ontologies, as well as practitioners' competencies, attitudes, and creativity for subject boundary-crossing. Consequently, we conceptualise teachers' roles as lying in the span between 'teacher as polymath' and 'teacher as collaborator'. The present work also provides a instrument for exploring curricular conditions for interdisciplinarity between subjects on a more general basis.