Instructor Priorities for Undergraduate Organic Agriculture Education

Organic agriculture courses and degrees in higher education have become more common in recent decades. In this article, we characterized instructor priorities for organic agriculture education and identified critical concepts and skills to be included in curriculum. We used interviews and surveys to learn from 19 instructors from universities and colleges in the United States. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded for frequency of mentions. The critical concepts most frequently mentioned by instructors were soils, ecological principles, and certification standards. The topics that instructors most frequently mentioned covering occasionally or not at all included social dimensions, climate change, and livestock production. Instructors frequently mentioned the challenges of lack of teaching materials specific to organic agriculture and lack of expertise, given the multidisciplinary span of organic agriculture. Including guest lectures was mentioned as a way to cover topics where instructors felt they had less knowledge or expertise. Instructors stated that the most challenging topics and skills for students to learn included systems thinking, managing nutrients, and performing fertilizer calculations. Our summary highlights the specific concepts that instructors across the United States prioritize in their teaching, laying the groundwork for future curriculum development. They offer valuable insight into the challenges and successes in organic agriculture teaching. Department of Plant Sciences, Univ. of Wyoming, 1000 E. University Ave., #3354, Laramie, WY 82071. *Corresponding author (rjabbour@uwyo.edu). Published in Nat. Sci. Educ. 48:190010 doi:10.4195/nse2019.06. 0010 Received 3 June 2019 Accepted 17 Aug. 2019 Copyright © 2019 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/). Core Ideas • Instructors’ priorities include soil fertility, ecology, and certification standards. • Instructors consider systems thinking and nutrient management to be the most challenging areas for students to learn. • The lack of teaching materials specific to organic agriculture highlights an opportunity for textbook development in this area. The organic industry has grown considerably over the past decade, with more than 20,000 USDA certified organic operations in the United States alone, and a retail market valued over US$39 billion (USDA, 2016). Although this production method only comprises a small percentage of the overall US food market, it provides an alternative market for producers with higher premiums and its growth is largely spurred by a younger generation of consumers (Greene et al., 2017). When surveyed, more than half of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 indicated they actively include organic food in their diets (Greene et al., 2017). The interest the younger generation has in organic production and foods is reflected in the initiation of organic academic certificates and degrees, as well as student farms at institutions of higher education (Sayre and Clark, 2011; Organic Farming Research Foundation, 2012). As of 2011, there were 8 organic programs and 36 organic student farms at land-grant universities (Organic Farming Research Foundation, 2012), and this has likely grown in recent years. The instructors pioneering these programs train the next generation of organic producers, researchers and consumers. They face unique challenges compared with colleagues teaching more standard agricultural production courses. These instructors teach a relatively new topic, which is closely tied to changing regulations and need to address the diversity of disciplines relevant to organic agriculture. As in any classroom, students bring prior knowledge and experience with them on day one (Handlesman et al., 2007). Prior knowledge on a topic can help or hinder student’s future learning (Ambrose et al., 2010) and the topic of organic agriculture can be encountered by students at the grocery store, through social media, or in some cases on their own family farm, resulting in many students possessing some knowledge on the topic (Dahm et al., 2009). Students in agriculture classes enter with incoming, often emotional, perceptions of organic agriculture. A survey of more than 3000 Finnish students demonstrated that attitudes toward organic food were associated with intuitive thinking styles, in contrast to rational thinking styles, and personal values (Saher et al., 2006). Thus, student engagement with this course material can be more intuitive than rational, in connection to their personal values. Instructors need to teach about organic agriculture in ways that allow students to build on previous knowledge while interrogating their own incoming views and possible misconceptions. With programs and courses in organic agriculture now offered at colleges and universities, there is still some uncertainty about how to best teach this burgeoning field Published September 19, 2019