Connecting Pre-Service Agricultural Education Students to Horticultural Teaching Practices and Resources

As the population of the United States and world grows, the need for efficient food production becomes more salient, thus making individuals with knowledge and understanding of the agriculture industry and STEM careers increasingly necessary. At [UNIVERSITY], students majoring in agricultural education are offered courses to build their knowledge and understanding of agriculture. In turn, as teachers they will be able to communicate and teach their students, positively increasing their students’ interest in agriculture and STEM careers. One course offered to address this need is part of an Advanced Life Science (ALS) course block and is titled “ALS: Teaching with Plants.” This course, created in 2008, is offered to agricultural education students in their final spring semester, four weeks prior to their student teaching experiences. The purpose of this content-specific course is to provide pre-service students with lessons, activities, resources and experiments that prepare them to introduce horticultural content into their future classrooms. The course begins with a review of educational pedagogies taught during their previous coursework. Students are then shown how to include methods and activities reflecting those pedagogies in a horticultural context. Topics include: DNA extraction, simulations and genetic modules, fast plant genetics and seed growth chambers. Students also present activities they will teach in their future classrooms relating to horticultural sciences, some activities presented included: plant parts, domestication of crops, herbicide applications, and soil testing. Along with the topics, content, and format of the course, the professor also has a mixture of horticulture and extension experience. This affords access to beneficial horticultural education resources that can be passed on to the pre-service teachers. During an informal post-course discussion, students indicated the resources provided allowed them to feel more self-efficacious to student-teach and more comfortable teaching horticultural content. Students also indicated horticultural topics they still did not feel confident teaching (e.g., landscape design) and vocalized a desire for more resources and activities. For this reason, the “ALS: Teaching with Plants” course is considering an increase from 4 weeks to a semester long (16 weeks), allowing more laboratory time and curriculum preparation for both faculty and students. In turn, this should increase pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy in teaching horticultural content in their future classrooms.