Performing Department
Extension
Non Technical Summary
The objectives of the Growing Global Agriculturalist project are to broaden and deepen young people's knowledge and involvement in agriculture so that they believe in and act on their ability as agricultural learners, leaders, innovators, global citizens, and agents of change in a way that leads them to agriculture as a future workforce opportunity. Supporting the Agriculture Systems and Technology AFRI priority area, this project will engage youth in learning about various agricultural approaches and systems, including plant growth, biotechnology, aquaponics/hydroponics, crop scouting technology, and soil and irrigation technology. Objectives will be achieved through a comprehensive four-year program design that engages 105 urban, suburban, rural, and tribal youth (80 youth in grades 3-8; 25 youth in grades 10-13) in agriculture activities at increasing levels of intensity, beginning by fueling their interest, then developing it further, and finally cultivating authentic involvement. Grant project activities include the development of curricular resources in year 1, and implementation of 4 long-term clubs that incorporate college campus immersion experiences, field/industry tours, and urban/rural exchanges, and three public agronomy and crop-scouting events annually that will directly engage these 105 youth, and indirectly engage 1500 other youth, with priority on reaching underserved audiences. Partners collaborating on this project are committed to these activities. This will be a four-year effort starting in the fall of 2021 and ending in the fall of 2025, with sustainability efforts continuing the program after funding is gone.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The Growing Global Agriculturalists program design is characterized by an ongoing process of expanding our capacity to address community needs related to agriculture and collective ability to continue the work. The project engages older teens as leaders and mentors (4-H Agriculture Ambassadors) who can carry out the goals with the likelihood of greater and continued impact in the future. Scaffolded agriculture opportunities have the potential to gain the interest of other youth not directly involved in the project. The program design engages adult volunteers to support the coordination and implementation of the program model for easier replication. The project design includes the following activities, designed to encourage long-term involvement in agriculture by building youth knowledge, skills, and interest, as well as public confidence in agriculture, in a way that is sustainable over time.Curriculum Development. The project team will expand the existing Extension 4-H agronomy curriculum, Growing Global, to include 10 additional lessons (20 total) with a greater emphasis on data science, technology, and research skills related to various approaches in agriculture. Supplementing it will be 10 short videos, created in collaboration with our youth 4-H Agriculture Ambassadors. These videos will feature teens or engaging professionals inspiring youth to further explore agronomy topics and issues by demonstrating an experiment or activity, sharing agriculture workforce options, and building public confidence in agriculture technology. All curricular resources will be used in 4-H Agronomy club sites and marketed and shared to schools and other youth organizations to increase interest. Training will aid 4-H club leaders to deliver content. Adapting content from the Growing Global curriculum, the team will also create five agronomy project kits to be marketed to 4-H and other youth not directly involved in this project as an option for independent learning.Youth Programming. The Growing Global Agriculturalists program design engages youth in the following activities that meet them at their varying levels of interest, experience, and ability, so they can develop their knowledge and expertise in agriculture authentically."Plant" activities. In this fueling interest phase, the goal is to fuel youth interest in agriculture by building their skills and knowledge through project learning. 4-H Agronomy clubs engage youth at four locations in Minnesota, each with 20 youth participants (80 total)--two urban (Minneapolis and St. Cloud) and two rural (Mahnomen and Swift counties). Each site will recruit underserved youth and will screen and train adult volunteers and mentors to help lead and sustain these unique clubs. Youth will experiment with various growing techniques using agriculture technology and share this experience with the public through demonstrations and other showcase opportunities. Two 4-H Agronomy Project Days events will be offered in the vicinity of the four 4-H Agronomy clubs. These events will be open to all youth to learn about agronomy and growing plants through demonstrations by agriculture professionals and youth-led agronomy activities. These project days will engage the general public to increase confidence around agriculture and food systems. Formats will be tested and available to other Extension staff for sustainability and replication. For the youth in the 4-H Agronomy clubs, these events will also allow them to practice their agronomy leadership."Grow" activities. In this developing interest phase, the goal is for youth to see how agriculture technology knowledge and skills can be applied. Each 4-H Agronomy club site will have 3 field and industry visits and urban/rural agricultural exchange trips annually to visit urban and rural farms, fields, agriculture research stations, and for-profit/nonprofit entities of different sizes. These trips will also be open to other 4-H youth to attend. From experiencing hydroponics in the urban setting to touching and seeing plants in the soil in rural farms, youth will begin to appreciate different techniques and technologies involved in growing plants and make a greater connection between their interest in agriculture and its workforce potential. At least one of these trips will exchange urban and rural youth, so they can show each other what agriculture looks like in their geographic setting. Each 4-H Agronomy club will also attend one college campus immersion trip per year. Using our Youth Aspirations curriculum (Tzenis, 2020), the project team will work with established higher education partnerships to immerse youth in a college setting, to help them envision their future and begin to take steps toward aspiration achievement."Cultivate" activities. In this authentic interest phase, the goal is for youth to apply their knowledge and skills to real-world challenges. 4-H Agronomy club participants, County 4-H Crop-Scouting Teams, and Crop-Scouting teams from other organizations will be invited to participate in an annual 4-H Crop Scouting event. This event will be located at a college institution which will help with program sustainability. This phase also includes 4-H Agriculture Ambassadors. This group of 25 teen leaders will assist in mentoring and teaching younger youth participants, develop curricular videos, engage the public at local and statewide showcases, and work with the project manager to positively represent agriculture during Agriculture Day and week in March. Finally, Mentorships with agricultural professionals such as agronomists, seeds salesmen, and agricultural engineers will help deepen the learning, guide youth to education and career opportunities, and form positive relationships with adults that expose them to real-world perspectives. Research shows that one of the number one factors in a young person's life is a positive relationship with a caring adult outside of one's family (Search Institute, 2021).
Project Methods
The project team leadership team includes the PI (Brian Mc Neill) and Co-I (Jessica Russo), Extension youth development evaluation specialist (Sam Grant), and Extension crops specialist (Jared Goplen). The leadership team will convene quarterly to ensure outcomes. In addition, PI and Co-I will lead curriculum development and convene monthly meetings with the rest of the project implementation team, which includes five other Extension youth development staff. Serving as project manager of the implementation team will be an Extension professional, to be hired, to lead the overall coordination, recruitment, and marketing of youth program activities. Four local 4-H Extension Educators, Amie Mondl, Erin Anderson, Rebekah Donner, and Becca Turnquist, will implement the 4-H Agronomy club sites, field and industry visits/urban-rural exchanges, and campus immersion experiences. This includes training and managing volunteers, and ensuring quality implementation of the Growing Global curriculum and program. They will also assist in curriculum development and work with Agriculture Ambassadors to develop accompanying videos. Assisting them will be two college agriculture students hired as part-time Project Specialists to work at the community sites. Evaluation will be carried out with the guidance of the state evaluation specialist and supported by the project leadership and implementation teams.?Evaluation plan. Outcomes will be measured using a mixed-methods approach to understand the program's impact on youth. Quantitatively, we will use a summative survey instrument that measures youth learning indicators. Youth directly served will complete a retrospective post-then-pre survey at the end of each program year, assessing knowledge, attitude, and behavior change from the start of the program to the end of the program. Program attendance and project enrollment records will be used to understand the role of program dosage and youths' experiences and the influence of the program on youth interest and engagement. This will give information both for youth directly served by the program and youth indirectly served by the program (i.e., to find out how many youths, as a result of indirect exposure to the program, gained an interest in agriculture). Qualitatively, we will conduct focus groups to understand how youth view agricultural technology, their educational/career future, and their global citizenship in agriculture. Focus groups will be used as both formative assessments (collected mid-way each program year) and as summative assessments conducted at the end of each of the four urban and rural sites. To gather data on the impact of youth indirectly served, we will require users of the Growing Global curriculum to fill out a short survey in order to download the curriculum, requesting information about where and how many youths they anticipate serving with the curriculum and whether or not we can follow up in 6 months asking about outcomes.While program and project participation data can provide insight into the effectiveness of programming, it can also be misleading (causation does not equal correlation). The project team will therefore cross-reference direct and indirect participation in the program with participation in agriculture-related projects. This should provide a better potential correlation between program exposure and increased engagement in agriculture learning. The inclusion of both quantitative and qualitative methods will mitigate the weakness of each. To mitigate the susceptibility of focus groups to facilitator bias, the focus groups will be conducted by Extension staff not directly involved in implementation. Because focus groups are not helpful in gathering information about individuals, we will also be using a retrospective post-then-pre survey method.Limitations to the retrospective post-then-pre survey method include difficulty with recall, and vulnerability to bias (e.g., learners answering how they think the evaluator wants). The project team will mitigate this limitation through experiential learning techniques that ensure that each learning session is knowledge-centered (clear focus on content and applied skill-building) and assessment-centered (consistent feedback and reflection) (McLaughlin, 2000). This should help youth know, by the time of the survey, what they have gained from their participation.