Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
Practices
- Education and Training: decision support system, farmer to farmer, focus group, workshop, youth education
Abstract:
Sustainability insecurities of our food system include: aging farmers, affordable access to healthy food, environmental damage, and affordable land acquisition for beginner farmers. Using a systems approach, schools can provide a logical venue to address these by partnering with small farmers and educating future farmers and consumers. Doing so will provide short and long term farm profits, stewardship of natural resources, and community resilience and quality of life.
One problem our grant addressed is the lack of proven teacher/farmer resources for creating quality farm and school programs and partnerships. Our first goal was to provide a well developed curriculum that includes the necessary elements of professional teaching that schools and farmers can rely on for grade appropriate programing in the NCR, namely educational standards. The educational standards we chose are Next Generation Science Standards(NGSS) as they are regionally, vs a single state, accepted across the 12 state north central region. SARE grant funding allowed us to take a newly, teacher/farmer, authored manuscript and review, edit, and test the contents before publishing. This was accomplished through a peer farmer review team and professional academic reviews for content, organization, and adding NGSS to all appropriate lessons. This curriculum includes a diverse collection of farmers across the NCR as role models and provides engaging activities for grades 3-12 for learning about regenerative farming and sustainability practices.
Secondly we address the lack of resources available to foster successful farm and school partnerships by sharing our own proof of concept farm and school program at Good Shepherd Montessori School, in South Bend, IN. We accomplished this by creating a 21 video online conference that includes local farmers, agriculture professionals and academics sharing their farm and school stories, practices and landscape tours. See this conference at https://www.gsms.org/food-farming-and-sustainability/. This conference serves as a professional development workshop for teachers and farmers interested in partnerships for youth education.
The majority of grant participants(over 50%) who were pre and post surveyed with regards to our curriculum exposure, including interns, teachers and students, showed an increase in understanding about the role of carbon and nitrogen cycling in regenerative farming systems.
This project is important and innovative because it fosters partnerships that are mutually beneficial while advancing farming education and exposure as a core curriculum in schools. Using a farmer developed curriculum, centered on sustainable practices, adds quality to any educational setting by fostering a practical and hands-on teaching approach for all subjects while exposing students to farming as a respected and important career choice.
Project objectives:
- Establish NRCS and review team partnership and meeting schedule
- Review farm curriculum with established team
- Hire farm intern(s) for research, marketing, video editing, and workshop needs
- Produce videos of 6 farm enterprises highlighting sustainable farming practices from states in the NCR and use videos for curriculum enhancement for grades 3-12.
- Hire STEM education expert to apply Next Generation Science Standards(NGSS) and evaluation rubrics to curriculum units
- Conduct curriculum reviews by academic experts
- Edit and Proof curriculum for publication
- Collect and evaluate pre/post survey data
- Prepare SARE reports