Performing Department
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Non Technical Summary
The Farm to Classroom: Exploring Mississippi Agriculture and Natural Resources in Virtual Reality (F2CVR) Project seeks to enhance K-6 education in Mississippi by strengthening agricultural science and literacy. The project's main objectives are as follows: Objective 1: Develop a virtual reality (VR) app showcasing Mississippi's agricultural production for immersive learning in K-6 classrooms, Objective 2: Enhance teachers' knowledge of agricultural science and literacy through an extended, micro credentialed, online professional development course, and Objective 3: Empower teachers to become mentors, promoting agricultural concepts, and enhancing their leadership within their schools.F2CVR aligns with AFRI priorities, focusing on Mississippi agriculture and using VR to highlight agricultural systems across the state. Recent studies revealed misconceptions rather than agricultural illiteracy among students, emphasizing the need for formal agricultural education. Building on previous success, F2CVR provides hands-on experiences for K-6 teachers to seamlessly integrate agricultural concepts into their curricula. Elementary education is an ideal starting point, aligning with state standards in subjects like social studies, science, English/language arts, and mathematics. F2CVR involves creating immersive VR experiences, expanding online professional development, and offering mentorship opportunities beyond the professional development. Teachers will participate in an 8-week online PD program, 360-degree VR and face-to-face immersive learning experiences and continue mentorship and collaboration within their peer-teacher groups through the Mighty Networks platform. F2CVR establishes a self-sustaining model with a project website and app for teachers to upload and access instructional content. Lesson plans and resources will remain available beyond the project's funding, ensuring continued integration in Mississippi classrooms.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
Farm to Classroom: Exploring Mississippi Agriculture and Natural Resources inVirtual Reality (F2CVR) Project seeks to improve the quality of education for students inGrades K-6 in Mississippi by strengthening the teaching of agricultural science and literacy inthe classrooms. Participating Mississippi K-6 teachers will advance students' understanding andpractices of agricultural literacy related to the Mississippi commodities and natural resourceswithin K-6 classrooms. F2CVR will boost student engagement and achievement in the K-6curriculum and increase student potential for selecting a career in agriculture. Additonally,F2CVR will expand educators skills in presenting agricultural science and literacy curriculum,and allow these teachers to become mentors within their school districts. The following F2CVRobjectives are based on feedback from previous PDAL professional development programsoffered in the state and can be measured to determine the level of program success.Objective 1: University personnel will construct immersive learning experinces through thecreation of a virtual reality (VR) app highlighting Mississippi production agriculture. Universitypersonnel will work with K-6 teachers in conducting immersive learning experiences inclassrooms.Objective 2: Teachers will improve their knowledge of agricultural science and literacyinstruction and make connections to the appropriate content and grade-level curriculum. Briefly,they will implement agricultural literacy curriculum in their classrooms after participating in anexpanded online professional devlopment course and receive a microcredential.Objective 3: Teachers will become ambassadors and serve as teacher leaders in their schools bymentoring others on how to promote agricultural science concepts in their content areas.
Project Methods
F2CVR PD immerses K-6 in-service teachers from districts across Mississippi in agricultural literacy instruction, specifically focused on Mississippi commodities and natural resources curriculum. The F2CVR experience builds teachers' pedagogical content knowledge and self-efficacy related to teaching agricultural literacy concepts, so they can confidently integrate those concepts in their content curriculum. The teachers will participate in an intensive 8-week online, asynchronous learning experience followed by a face-to-face 3-day training on the campus of Mississippi State University (MSU) where they will learn how to use an immersive VR app that features production farms across Mississippi in their classroom instruction. In addition, participants will learn how to capture content and create their own immersive experiences for inclusion on the VR app.In-service teachers will participate in an 8-week online learning experience concluding with a face-to-face 3-day long training on the campus of MSU. Specific agricultural topics include: Mississippi commodities (e.g., cattle, poultry, honeybees, aquaculture, soybeans, forestry, etc) with the integration of Mississippi natural resources (e.g., wildlife, fisheries, forestland, wetlands, farmlands). Specific literacy topics include reading and writing informational texts. Further, the teachers will learn about how to be a mentor to their colleagues at their school site; there will be a large emphasis on how to construct teacher leadership in the classroom, department, and grade level through mentorship. Once the teachers have completed the 8-week asynchronous PD, they will receive a Ag Literacy micro-credential to add to their résumé and teaching portfolio.Further, they will attend a face-to-face immersive learning VR experience where they will spend three days on MSU's campus learning how to incorporate VR production farm visits into their classroom instruction via the app created by F2CVR personnel. At the conclusion of the online and face-to-face programming, the participating teachers will earn four Continuing Education Units (CEUs), a stipend for participating, and a toolkit of supplies needed to develop their own ag literacy-focused VR experiences. These toolkits will include two VR headsets for the teachers to take back to their classrooms.Throughout the F2CVR project, in-service teachers will learn how to incorporate agricultural literacy into their classrooms. Dr. Carley Morrison will provide instruction in agricultural literacy and oversee the performance of the program including the facilitation of the online PD and facilitation of the face-to-face immersive experience. Dr. OP McCubbins will coordinate the planning, development, and maintenance of the virtual field trips and accompanying app. He will also assist with the online PD and face-to-face immersive experiences. Dr. Stephanie Lemley will help design and coordinate the online PD and assist with the face-to-face immersive experiences. She will also teach the literacy learning and mentorship components. One graduate student will be employed to work on the grant for year one to year two and another graduate student will be employed to work for the grant for year three to year four.In year one the graduate student will work with the PI and Co-PIs in the planning and development of the expanded PD program, VR field-trips and app (including travel with Co-PIs to collect videos, interviews, and images for the VR fieldtrips), and F2CVR website and social media platform updates. As indicated by the included documentation of collaboration, commodity groups and their producers from across the state support this project and have agreed to participate in VR filming, photography, and interviews. As a result, the participating producers will be provided a stipend for their time, and the commodity groups will be provided a set of 10 VR headsets so they can share the VR experiences at educational outreach events.In years two through four, the graduate student will assist the PI and Co-PIs in creating the survey tools and conducting the pre/post/delayed post interviews with the teachers in the face-to-face immersive learning experiences. Further, the graduate student will be responsible for helping to coordinate and facilitate the online and face-to-face professional development, and will take lead in creating and disseminating recruitment materials. Lastly, they will manage the F2CVR website and and app while also creating content for the social media platforms to promote the program.