Refraining SAE: The Tricycle Principle

Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) is one of the true trademarks of every agricultural education program. Without such a component, agricultural education faces the risk of losing its identity and purpose in the secondary school system. There are many positive attributes associated with SAE. It is considered to be important because it improves learning, student personal development, and occupational development (Newcomb, McCracken, and Warmbrod, 1986), all of which are part of a comprehensive agricultural education program (Phipps and Osborne, 1988). SAE is "characterized as agriculture-based, supervised, experience-centered, and individualized to meet the needs of [today's] diverse student clientele" (Barrick et al., 1992). SAE blends theory and experience to make the student's education relevant and meaningful (Phipps and Osborne, 1988). Not only do students benefit from the SAE experience, so do the teachers, employers, agricultural education programs, communities, and agricultural industry (Barrick et al., 1992). At face value, these positive attributes can sell anyone on the importance of SAE. In reality, however, SAE is faced with its own set of challenges. The Handbook on Supervised Agricultural Experience (Barrick et al., 1992) even states that SAE is one of the most important, yet most challenging aspects of a complete agricultural education program. Teachers fully support SAE conceptually but fail to completely implement it in practice; in part, because participation is lacking by all parties (Dyer and Osborne, 1995, and Steele, 1997). SAE programs often lack definition, focus, and direction because of the changes in the curriculum from a total focus on agricultural production to more diverse aspects of agriculture (Dyer and Osborne, 1995). Dyer and Osborne (1995) stated that this curriculum shift has resulted in diminishing teacher satisfaction with SAE programs. Consequently, Agricultural Education is in a dilemma and what is needed is "a comprehensive overhaul of thinking about and practice of SAE. " (Steele, 1997). With these concerns in mind, we must reframe our perception of SAE. Part of the problem is that we continue to frame SAE around easy and well defined constraints of production agriculture and placement in production. These types of SAE fit neatly into the traditional framework of a project that is continual, expandable, and, most importantly, recordable. These types of SAE are the ideal "record book project. " The record book project is exactly the perception that we must be pulled away from because it limits the SAE opportunities of students. Camp, Clarke, and Fallon (2000) suggested that the scope of agriculture has grown and changed remarkably in the past 50 years. The broad scope of agriculture suggests that the SAE concept must be altered to meet the demands of interested students. This diverse and enlarging scope of agriculture is what has challenged teachers on the local level. The challenge has caused many to give up on SAEs or limit them to only a few students that fit the traditional SAE mode. This selective process of only working with a few students, if any at all, on an individualized SAE program could mark the beginning of the end of secondary agricultural education as we know it and have defined it. The death of secondary agricultural education may seem fairly extreme and radical to many. However, in the age of educational reform, accountability and individual choice without individualized, student-centered instruction through SAE, agricultural education programs could be terminated in most secondary school systems. Without SAE, an agricultural education program offers only the classroom instruction and personal development components. In the classroom, agricultural education is currently working hard to align itself and its curricula with the accountability measures of math, reading and writing. Agricultural educators say that agricultural education can provide additional opportunities for students to develop these skills and, therefore, support the students and school district in obtaining higher achievement scores. …