Search results

Sustainability challenges are omnipresent. This study aims to identify consumer segments based on food consumption practices from purchasing to disposal. A priori work identified quality attributes, food responsibility, dietary choices and food organisation and management within the home as key influences. Each represents an opportunity for consumers to employ more sustainable food behaviours. A priori work identified several indicators for each of these influences. This study explored the suitability of these indicators for measuring the identified key influences.

The authors used an online survey of 324 Irish food consumers in January 2021 to address online food interests, purchasing preferences and purchase behaviour linked to food sustainability.

The authors identify four consumer segments – food dabblers, food appreciators, pro-sus and pressured – which present a holistic view of the sustainable behaviours practiced by food consumers. The findings provide insight into the range of sustainability-related food behaviours actioned by consumers – from interest in meat-free products, organics and local produce to having an organised stock at home and minimising waste. The findings shed light on how consumers integrate elements of sustainability into their food lifestyles.

This study captures sustainability-related food behaviours from the point of purchase through to consumption and disposal and identifies four new consumer segments based on interests, preferences and behaviours.

In this chapter, we develop the “hall of mirrors” metaphor for practicum learning, introduced in Schön (1987) and expanded upon in MacKinnon (1989), as a heuristic for considering the ways in which we might claim that our practice has transformed through engaging with self-study methodology. First, we reconsider Schön's (1987) ideas about professional learning and their implications for our understanding of self-study, specifically, his claim that professional learning is unique in that a hall of mirrors is created “on the basis of parallelisms between practice and practicum” (p. 297). This parallelism is particularly relevant for teacher educators as we often aim to engage our students in the very practices we hope they will enact in schools. In so doing, we consider MacKinnon's cautions about over-simplifying any model of teacher education. Second, we use these ideas to each select excerpts from self-study work we have conducted in our careers to identify moments of transformed thinking about teacher education. Finally, we arrived at a new metaphor of a concave mirror for a retrospective look at the results of our self-study investigations. A concave mirror, unlike its planar counterpart, creates different orientations of images (right-side up vs. up-side down), depending on how far an object is away. We develop this final metaphor as a way of thinking about the differences inherent in treating self-study work at a distance, after some time has passed from the original moments when we were embedded in a hall-of-mirrors relationship with our students.