Does Incorporating Service-learning Across a Greenhouse Production Curriculum Enhance the Learning Experience?

Greenhouse production courses generally focus on how to produce specific types of plants. However, increasing student understanding of why we produce greenhouse crops may enhance their learning experiences. The objective of our research was to quantify student attitudes towards service learning components in greenhouse production courses at Iowa State University. In Hydroponic Food Crop Production, students donated the produce produced to a local food bank specializing in perishable food and volunteered at the food bank. Students in Fall Greenhouse Crop Production selected different community partners in need and provided them with flowering potted plants. For Spring Greenhouse Crop Production, students produced annual flowering bedding plants for a children’s garden. An questionnaire was distributed to students in each of the crop production courses at the end of the semester containing four statements with Likert scale responses: 1) I see the value in connecting the technical skills we learn in class with a service project for a community partner (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = strongly agree); 2) Completing the service project enhanced the technical skills I learned in class (1 = strongly disagree, 4 = strongly agree); 3) I (1 = decreased, 3 = increased) the amount of effort I put into growing plants knowing a community partner was receiving the crops I produced ; and 4) Was the service learning component of this class… (1 = too little, 3 = too much). Across all three courses, students tended to strongly agree (3.6–3.7) that they saw value connecting what they were learning in the classroom and laboratory with their projects and agreed (2.8–3.2) that technical skills were enhanced as a result of their project. For all three courses students believed that the service learning component caused them to slightly increase their effort in producing greenhouse crops, with responses ranging from 2.3 (Spring Greenhouse Crop Production) to 2.6 (Fall Greenhouse Crop Production). While students generally thought the service learning component was not too much, student producing spring annuals for a children’s garden believed that the component was “just right” (2.0), while the students producing hydroponic food crops for the perishable food bank thought that the project was slightly more than they felt was appropriate (2.2). Based on our results, we believe that including service learning components to greenhouse crop production courses can positively impact the student learning experience and place their discipline-specific skills in a broader context.