Performing Department
Parks, Recreation and Tourism
Non Technical Summary
It is understood that climate change will threaten the resiliency of agro-ecological systems, through impacts such as, decreases in crop yields, lack of access to fresh water for irrigation, and temperature changes affecting seafood farming operations. Although a number of technological solutions continue to contribute to agricultural adaptations, the success of these solutions hinges on widespread societal support, particularly among the agricultural community. Unfortunately, farmers are consistently some of the most skeptical groups of anthropogenic climate change, with over 88% associating the phenomenon with natural causes. As the recognition of human-causes is a key belief to promoting and engaging in mitigation behaviors, there is a significant missed opportunity in the agricultural sector in combating climate change. However, research shows that climate change perceptions are influenced by personal ideologies, worldviews, and the opinions of one's social group as opposed to climate science fact. As leaders in the agricultural sector have taken a stance against comprehensive climate mitigation policies, it is unsurprising that many farmers do not accept human-caused climate change.Promisingly, children and young adults appear to be more receptive to climate change messaging than their adult counterparts. Research finds that at high levels of climate change knowledge, adolescents are better able to separate out climate science fact from personal ideologies and opinions. Fortunately, building on agricultural traditions such as 4-H, which drives innovation through youth, leveraging the opinions of adolescents to influence the climate change perceptions may provide the opportunity to make inroads with adults where other strategies have failed. This type of communication, known as intergenerational learning (IGL) from the child-to-adult direction, has been successful in numerous contexts including recycling, views on sexual orientation, and grocery shopping purchasing decisions. It has not however, been previously tested with climate change information in agricultural communities.As such, this project will set out to determine if a curriculum designed to maximize the chance of IGL results in the increased climate concern and commitment to climate resilient agricultural practices in North Carolina high school agriculture students and their parents. Thirty-six high school agriculture teachers from across North Carolina will be trained in the curriculum over two years, and will be asked to teach the curriculum to their classrooms of students. Survey data before and after the curriculum is implemented will be collected from at least 1,800 students and 540 parents, and statistically analyzed to determine whether IGL has occurred. Ultimately, it is expected that IGL will occur from students to their parents. Results from this study will help build a climate literate citizenry that not only supports, but also implements sustainable agriculture practices, in an effort to help make agriculture systems resilient to the impending impacts of climate change.
Animal Health Component
0%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to build climate concern and climate resilient agricultural practices among current and future agricultural professionals through intergenerational learning. To achieve this goal, this project will address the following research, education, and extension objectives:Recruit and train 36 North Carolina high school agriculture teachers in the Project Learning Tree Southeastern Forests and Climate Change (SFCC) module.Increase the self-efficacy in teaching climate change among the 36 participating agriculture teachers.Increase the climate concern of the 36 participating high school agriculture teachers, at least 1,800 high school agriculture students associated with those teachers, and at least 540 parents associated with those students, through intergenerational learning.Increase climate resilient agricultural practices among the 1,800 participating high school students and 540 parents associated with the students through intergenerational learning.Experimentally test if the SFCC training and implementation increases climate concern and climate resilient agricultural practices among high school students and their parents through intergenerational learning regardless of personal ideologies (e.g., politics, worldview).Engage with over 100 undergraduate pre-service agriculture teachers and 10 pre-service environmental education graduate students in a robust service-learning project experience complete with training in the SFCC module.Increase the climate concern among the 100 pre-service agriculture teachers and the 10 pre-service environmental educators.Increase the self-efficacy of teaching climate change to agriculture audiences in the 100 pre-service agriculture teachers and 10 pre-service environmental educators.Increase the likelihood that the 10 pre-service environmental educators will include education and extension based activities in their future careers.Increase knowledge among all participating students of social science research methods, including survey design, sampling, data collection, and analysis.Engage a minimum of 12 undergraduates and 10 graduate students in the data collection, analysis, and publication process beyond the SFCC training.
Project Methods
Modification of the Southeastern Forests and Climate Change Curriculum This project leverages the already existing USDA-NIFA funded Southeastern Forests and Climate Change (SFCC) Project Learning Tree curricula. The curriculum will be modeled to follow the identified best practices of intergenerational transfer curricula, and will include: 1) hands-on, action oriented lessons, 2) a focus on agricultural and climate change impacts in the Southeast, 3) a service-learning project on a local farm that connects to climate change, and 4) facilitated conversations between students and their parents through homework-based activities. SFCC's design already meets criteria one and two. I will create an additional lesson in fall 2019 that guides teachers in the service learning project and reflection to meet criteria three and four. I will help connect teachers with local farms in their areas, and teachers will be asked to engage their students in a service learning project that 1) connects to climate change, 2) is on a local farm, and 3) requires three hours spent outdoors. The additional activity will also include an interview between students and their parents and a reflective blog post to be included on a NCSU-hosted project website.Creation of the Parent, Student, and Teacher Questionnaires During fall 2019, survey instruments will be created for parents, students, and teachers through relying on previously created scales. I will measure climate concern of both students and their parents through use of the climate concern scale in the 2011 nation-wide climate change adolescent survey (Leiserowitz, Smith, & Marlon, 2011), as this scale has been validated for use in both parents and teenagers. To assess parent and student commitment to resilient agricultural practices, I will modify the Climate Change Behavior Scale from Stevenson and Peterson (2015) to include agriculture specific behaviors that promote agricultural resiliency (e.g., use of cover crops, carbon storage practices). To understand child perceived perceptions of influence and adult involvement in school activities, which are key components of facilitating intergenerational transfer (Duvall & Zint, 2007), I will rely on the scale developed and used by Lawson et al. (2018b) in their climate change intergenerational transfer study. For both the student and parent groups, demographic questions that are specific to farming (e.g., "Do you/your family work on a farm?," "How long have you been a farmer?," "Do you want to be a farmer after you finish school?") will be added to ensure that the survey is capturing farming families. For teachers, I will measure comfort in teaching climate change as a subject in the agriculture classroom through modification of the scale utilized by Stevenson, Peterson, and Bradshaw (2016). Demographic questions concerning gender, race/ethnicity, and political identity will be included for all three groups. Demographic questions such as income level and level of education will be included on parent and teacher surveys. I will pretest the modified instruments during fall 2019 with at least two classrooms, 80 parents, 80 undergraduate and graduate students, and 20 teachers through the use of online surveys for all four groups, where they will be guided by open-ended questions (e.g., what did this question mean to you?) to determine and improve face validity. I will follow up with at least 5 cognitive interviews (Desimone & Le Floch, 2004) of each group to allow for further refining of our scales. I will be sure that all my scales are analyzed for acceptable levels of internal consistency (Cronbach, 1951), and are single-factor scales (Comrey & Lee, 2009) with my samples, as they have been found in other contexts.Teacher Recruitment and Training I will recruit a minimum of 36 teachers between September and October of 2019 through agriculture education listservs, and at agricultural education conferences (e.g., NCATA), drawing on relationships members of my advisory board has with agriculture teachers across the state, as many attended programs at NC State. Interested teachers will be randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, who will receive the same treatment, but staggered (i.e., treatment group in year 1, control group in year 2). I can conservatively anticipate 50 students per teacher resulting in a sample of 1,800 students, annually. Assuming at least one parent per student, and a 30% response rate, I expect a sample of 540 parents, annually. However, to ensure that the project is capturing the sufficient number of farming families, at the end of year one, the sample numbers will be analyzed. If the project has not yet achieved 30% of the anticipated sample size, the teacher sample will be expanded in year two.During the late fall of 2019 and 2020, I will train the treatment teachers. Training will occur in an in-person, intensive format that allows for reflection and discussion of the curriculum, following best practices for teacher development (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009). During year one, only treatment teachers (n = 18) will be trained. In year two, the control teachers will be trained (n = 18). The teachers will be trained in six of the SFCC activities that are aligned to agriculture curricula (The Council, 2018). I will ask teachers to choose four of the six activities to teach, plus the additionally created activity for the service learning project during the spring semesters. During the spring of 2019, control teachers will be asked to teach their normal curriculum. In the fall of 2020, I will train the control teachers in a similar manner and ask all teachers to teach the curriculum.Data Collection and Analysis At the beginning and end of the Spring 2020 and 2021 semesters, the university graduate students will collect pre- and post-test data from high school students. On the same day, I will ask teachers to send home an online recruitment letter to that contains a link and QR code to the parent survey as a part of a homework assignment. One week following when the online survey was sent home, I will provide teachers with a paper survey packet following the protocol followed in Lawson et al. (2018a), to be sent home to parents that have not yet responded to the online survey, with a pre-addressed stamped envelope to facilitate easy survey return. I will use multiple linear regression models to test impacts of the curricular treatment. Among the high school students, I will model changes in climate concern and climate resilient agricultural behaviors as a function of treatment group membership, pretest scores to account for any ceiling effect (Keith, 2015), and other variables associated with student learning around climate change such as gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and teacher training (Stevenson et al., 2014). Among parents, I will predict changes in climate literacy and climate agricultural behaviors as a function of their student scores, and demographics including gender, age, income, and political affiliation. I will also account for correlation in responses of members from the same classroom or family through inclusion of random effects model (Keith, 2015). In a similar fashion, I will test for impacts of teaching and being trained in the SFCC module for the agricultural teachers through predicting changes in climate literacy and self-efficacy in teaching climate change as a function of pretest scores and demographics. During year two, I will complete a time series analysis (Fields, 2017) to compare how teaching the curriculum from year one to year two changes.