The Complete Guide to Becoming A Family and Consumer Sciences Teacher, Postsecondary

Chapter 1: What Does a Family and Consumer Sciences Teacher, Postsecondary Actually Do?

Walk into a Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) department on almost any college campus in the country, and you will not find a single day that looks like the one the brochure showed you. You might catch sight of a professor taste-testing a batch of cold-pressed juice with a student in a food science lab, or you might find one hunched over a spreadsheet of student retention data for the fall semester. The job consists of so many moving parts that a week can feel like three different jobs, so start by getting a handle on the core responsibilities that anchor everything else.

Your primary duty, the one that pays the bills and gets you the title, is teaching. For a postsecondary FCS teacher, that means standing in front of undergraduate students — sometimes graduate students, if you're at a university with a master's program — and delivering curriculum on topics ranging from nutrition and human development to interior design, fashion merchandising, and family resource management. The class size matters. At a community college or a teaching-focused regional university, you might have 25 to 60 students in a section. At a large research university, that number can jump to 200 or more for an introductory survey course that covers the basics of personal finance and wellness. In either case, you are responsible for building the syllabus, writing the lectures, designing the assignments, and grading the work that