Performing Department
Agric & Environmental Sci
Non Technical Summary
Increasing the share of renewable energy in the future energy balance will enhance environmental sustainability. Biofuel is one of the most rapidly developing sectors and is expected to become economically competitive than the conventional energy sources. Therefore, this area offers an excellent opportunity to train diverse background students in an emerging field of agricultural sciences. Current educational needs arise from the inability of American public to receive agricultural knowledge from everyday experiences. Such a link with ecological consciousness will motivate today's pre college students and enable them to become agriculturally literate. Therefore, the proposed project presents following specific objective; The specific objectives are: 1) To provide interactive training sessions on renewable energy through workshops and 4-H camps to selected school teachers, students, counselors, and 4-H extension agents; 2) To undertake syllabi design and specific steps to offer an inter-disciplinary baccalaureate level biofuel course at TSU; 3) To seek innovative methods to provide experiential learning to interested pre-college and college students in biofuel sciences; and 4) To develop and deliver course contents on-line by distributing existing and newly developed educational materials. The proposed biofuels course and trainings will be designed to cover all fundamentals of the scientific processes and financial considerations. This project integrates extension, pre-college, undergraduate and graduate educational approaches for strengthening TSU agricultural sciences. Thus NIFA's program area in K-12 as well as baccalaureate educational needs is strengthened while addressing the priority area of biofuels and natural resources.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Project goal Strengthen knowledge of pre-college/college students, professional educators and other stakeholders to make them more agriculturally literate as related to bio-fuels and natural resources. Objectives To provide interactive training sessions on renewable energy through workshops and 4-H camps to school teachers, students, counselors, and 4-H extension agents within the project's service area of Middle Tennessee; To undertake syllabi design and specific steps to offer an inter-disciplinary baccalaureate level biofuel course at TSU; To develop and deliver course contents on-line by distributing existing and newly developed educational materials; and To seek innovative methods to provide experiential learning to select pre-college and college students in biofuel sciences.
Project Methods
4-H camps will be the vehicle utilized for reaching young people and providing them basic knowledge about the biofuels. County Agents will help identify schools and students that meet the criteria of limited-resource, under-represented, hard-to-reach audiences. During summer, series of weeklong 4-H SET Camps will be offered to 25 to 40 students at TSU. These Developing Future Scientists Workshops will expose 6th through 11th graders to careers and hands on experience in the agricultural, environmental, and consumer sciences. In addition to the young people that will be served through in-school, afterschool, and summer enrichment 4-H activities and programs, the advanced placement science students will come to campus for lab experiences. We will also employ the train-the-trainer model to reach the largest number of young people as possible. County agents and volunteers will also receive training from specialists and faculty at TSU. Training workshops will provide hands-on experience for middle and high school teachers on biofuels science and the natural resource based bio-economy. There will be one-week workshops for at-least fifteen middle and high school teachers per year. The undergraduate level biofuel course will be developed that would have contents covering all of the scientific processes and financial considerations for biodiesel, ethanol, methane and advanced biofuel productions and train students for future bio-based economy. The production systems will be introduced that can achieve goals of long-term biomass production without depleting earth's resources. The course contents will be converted to a format suitable for on-line delivery with the help of TSU Distance Education & Multimedia Services (http://www.tnstate.edu/online). The educational material will thus be accessible through CAHNS (http://www.tnstate.edu/agriculture), eLearn@TNSTATE (https://elearn.tnstate.edu) and Regents Online Campus Collaborative (https://elearn.rodp.org) web-sites. Two to three students in the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at TSU will be offered 20-hours per week work-study positions during the school year. The students will be trained in all three areas of biofuels; plant production, industrial processing and economic analyses. In addition to providing the means for students to attend professional conferences, we will work with the students when feasible so they will be presenters at these conferences. Under the time-phased plan evaluation of both process and outcomes will be conducted by using a multi-dimensional approach, process oriented and quantifiable. The plan of evaluation consists of three phases: (1) annual evaluation of integration of extension and educational workshops for reaching the maximum number of schools in Tennessee; (2) progress towards plan and success in conducting experiential learning activities for students, 4-H clubs, teachers and counselors and annual evaluation of the plan of action; as well as (3) overall evaluation of the program and course development including increased enrollment at TSU. The success of the project will also be measured by the increase in number of students recruited, number of guest speakers and field trips arranged, as well as attendance and presentations at professional meetings.