Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
G022 MCCARTY HALL
GAINESVILLE,FL 32611
Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
Collaborative Curriculum Design for Authentic Agriscience Literacy (CCDAAL) is an Integrated Extension (75%) and Research (25%) project. In this project we will design and implement a research-based professional development program for secondary school agriculture and science teachers around authentic agriscience literacy. We will also conduct research on teacher outcomes from the professional development program. Teachers have few opportunities to learn authentic agriscience research practices (Banilower et al., 2018; Tolbert et al., 2019; Wang & Knobloch, 2018) and therefore struggle to implement these practices with their students. CCDAAL will equip educators with collaboratively-designed curricular materials and resources that address current research advances in plant and animal health, production, and products. Drawing from state and national standards in agricultural and science education as well as our own previous versions of professional development on contemporary agriscience, we will design an immersive hybrid workshop. Using an integrated collaborative curriculum design, secondary school educators and university education and agriscience researchers partner to develop new instructional modules that are timely, relevant, and rigorous additions to the science and agriculture curriculum. The workshop will take place on the University of Florida campus and virtually to engage educators in learning opportunities. When combined with the professional teaching knowledge of the participating educators, the learning opportunites will result in a suite of research-based classroom learning modules. Secondary school students will improve both their knowledge of contemporary agriscience issues in plant and animal health, production, and products and their competence with practices such as problem solving and communication.
Animal Health Component
100%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
100%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
In this project we will design and implement a research-based professional development program for secondary school agriculture and science teachers around authentic agriscience literacy and conduct research on teacher outcomes from the professional development program.Objectives:1. Equip 246 secondary school agriscience teachers with the knowledge, skills, experience, resources, incentives, and accountability to design and implement new lessons and activities that increase student understanding of agriscience practices, technologies, and careers; and2. Provide collaborative curriculum support to 96 educators designed to develop teachers into leaders who create and publish curricula that align research and educational standards to convey authentic concepts, practices, and pathways to the broad range of agriscience careers.
Project Methods
Participant Activities. CCDAAL Extension consists of three integrated components.Component 1: Friday immersive - Twenty-four secondary school teachers will come to the university campus. From the beginning, teachers will ground their work in equity-based learning practices through webinars for science education such as those from the STEM Teaching Tools Initiative (Bell & Bang, 2015). Teachers will also experience current research through laboratory-based authentic science inquiry practice activities, field research and laboratory visits, short presentations, and small and larger-group conversations. All facilities are accessible to participants with disabilities. The day will end with educators and university researchers identifying how contemporary research can be translated into the classroom. These ideas will form the basis of the subsequent virtual collaborative curriculum design and classroom implementation of authentic science practice- and equity-based lessons (Component 2). One set of practices teachers will be encouraged to use are those from active citizen science projects. Citizen science is a form of authentic research participation in which participants contribute to larger overall research projects mentored by professionals (e.g. McKenney et al., 2016). Participation is often scaffolded (Wood et al., 1976) through infrastructure provided by the professional researchers. Drawing on existing projects listed through Eddmaps.org, CitSci.org, or SciStarter.org will assist teachers and students in deep engagement in these projects.Each Component 1 implementation will focus on a different thematic element of plant and animal health, production, and products, for example: the disease tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV). In North Central Florida and the panhandle, peanut farming is a major agricultural endeavor which is currently threatened by TSWV. Building from a module developed previously by Co-PD Bokor, participants will learn about TSWV, its vectoring, control, and testing methods. UF researchers will give short presentations to frame the activities as participants discover the insect vector and consider how disease can spread among a peanut field. Teachers will compare fresh peanut plants for signs of disease, predict infectivity based on physical appearance, and use an immunostrip assay to test their predictions. Teachers and researchers will discuss current best practices in farming, selection of more resistant strains, and the future of genetic modification.Component 2: Collaborative Curriculum Design - Teacher and researcher teams will reunite virtually on a Saturday following Component 1 to collaboratively design equity-based authentic agriscience lessons for the classroom. Equity sessions will build on the initial framework and attention given in Component 1 to lead the teachers into critically considering how they build their lessons for inclusion of all learners. The CCDAAL team will lead synchronous scaffolded planning sessions to assist educators in thinking about and translating their on-campus experience into learning activities for their classroom. University science researchers will join the virtual conversations to ensure content and research practice authenticity. This is consistent with findings by Kennedy (2016), who reported increased adoption of practices and student learning when teachers were engaged in discussions of primary research. Education researchers will continuously monitor equity-based elements. At the end of the day, all teacher participants will present a brief outline of their lessons to the whole group in a virtual share-fair, allowing teachers to ask questions of each other, scientists, and education researchers.Keeping in mind an equity framework, resources such as recorded webinars and research-based readings will provide the backdrop of our Saturday and follow-up virtual sessions, with time and dates decided by the cohort teachers. These synchronous virtual meet-ups will feature regular group reflection sessions on equity and on progress in lesson planning. Synchronous sessions will take place for the four weeks following each Friday immersive. Teachers will be required to attend at least two additional virtual meet-ups (2 hours each). Collaborating educators will also have access to equipment and materials lockers needed to implement their modules in their classroom.Component 3: Content clinics - To increase the use of the collaboratively designed curricula, content clinics will be held to introduce new educators to the modules. The CCDAAL content clinics will focus on the original thematic Friday immersive and include research presentations and site visits, as well as feature multiple break-out sessions. Break-out sessions will include laboratory and activity-based hands-on sessions as well as mini-talks highlighting the collaboratively created lessons and classroom outcomes. Original collaborating educators will be invited to lead these activities and offer their perspective, facilitating not only leadership skills for the collaborating teachers, but also fostering collective participation among the teachers.Leadership skills. CCDAAL will produce teacher-leaders who can model communities of practice with other teachers in their schools, districts, and professional societies. These teacher-leaders can model co-design to incorporate authentic contexts and agriscience practices and further will be invited to lead breakout sessions in Component 3 to do exactly this. For students, lessons from the co-design workshops will emphasize practices of agriscience through leadership skills such as problem solving and communication to prepare them for the workforce. Teachers will be encouraged to bring their students to campus or invite researchers for in-person or virtual presentations to emphasize the real-world nature of the agriscience they are learning.CCDAAL Research. For each workshop component we will survey participants using pre-/retrospective-pre-/post- format as described in the Procedures, next section, and Evaluation and Research, later section. Following subsequent implementation of their lessons in the classroom, we will interview teachers from components 1 and 2 to ascertain their success in implementing the revised curriculum materials incorporating authentic agriscience and equity.