Teaching about Personal Finance in HCS – Suggestions from a Design-Based Research Approach

Supported by the notion of concept-driven design and design-based research, as well as the tradition of critical pedagogy and the idea of sociomaterialism, the aim of this article is to explore and develop a didactic tool for education in personal finance to be used within the formal education system. The object studied is an artefact for teaching about personal finance among Swedish middle school pupils in the subject area Home and Consumer Studies (HCS). We define personal finance as economizing with (limited) private resources. In this article, we (a) describe the process of developing a prototype for teaching about personal finance and (b) discuss qualities of platform and content in relation to such an artefact. The design process is based on three assumptions (Hernwall & Soderberg, 2019): in contrast to many statistical/assessment studies, children this age have at least an initial understanding of basic principles of personal finances and of economizing; HCS teacher education in Sweden has little (to no) focus on personal finance; and Swedish HCS teachers are confronted with an almost complete lack of teaching material in the domain. Conceptualized as a design-based research methodology, the focus is therefore a didactic interest in supporting teachers’ possibilities to teach personal finances to their pupils in a way that supports learning based on the pupils’ own understanding of the basic principles of economization. Framed by design-based research, the artefact developed within the project is a prototype of a digital tool to be used as a teacher support in teaching about personal finance. One acknowledged aspect of the use of digital tools is that they allow multimodal literacy. The development of a prototype with the purpose of creating a tool for teaching about personal finance followed an iterative cycle of three stages and four interpretative revisions. The parallel process of developing and testing a technological artefact has resulted in seven proto-theories on essential qualities for a didactic tool that supports learning about personal finance. This entails not only the appropriation of economy as “economization with (limited) resources”, but also guides the transition from understanding to a useful repertoire of teaching activities.