Professional Networking in Agricultural Education: Out from under the Bushel Basket (2006)

Don't keep your light hidden under a bushel basket. And, likewise, don't let the echoes of your own voice deafen you. All or our issues and challenges in agricultural science education are not merely solvable through our own ideas. The ideas and solutions that other areas of education and agriculture in general have generated may help us better educate students and maintain viability in secondary schools. In order to learn new ideas as well as share our own ideas, networking is essential and is a valuable part of becoming a professional. Many theories and discoveries in one area of science have applications to other areas. For example, the idea of fractals, shapes that appear similar at all scales of magnification and are therefore often referred to as 'infinitely complex', have been used in many areas outside of geometry. Examples of fractals are the Mandelbrot set, Koch's snowflake, and a computer image of broccoli (see Figures 1; Wikipedia, 2006). Fractals have applications in computing, the Internet, movies, art, science, organizational change, leadership, and possibly other fields. Another example is the logarithms of Jon Kleinberg, professor of computer science at Cornell University. Kleinberg reasoned that just as people experience the six degrees of separation phenomenon, so to do computer and other networks (Cornell Chronicle, 2005). His ideas and logarithms are also related to agriculture through plant genomics. Kleinberg's logarithms allowed comparative genomic maps of corn and rice to be generated in minutes, compared to the painstaking and time intensive process of hand mapping. Thus ideas in computing furthered science in agriculture. How did these folks working with fractals and logarithms develop their ideas which are transferable across domains? Perhaps they networked both within and outside of their respective professions. Most definitely they communicated with others about their ideas and shared and published their information and creations. How do we in agricultural education network, share, and publish knowledge about our profession with audiences outside of agricultural education? How do we seek answers to our challenges and obstacles from other areas of education, or even from other areas of agriculture and leadership? Research (i.e.: Park, Moore, & Rivera, 2006) and conventional wisdom indicate that agricultural science teachers avidly pursue networking as a means of professional development. Teachers regularly take advantage of opportunities to steal ideas from other agricultural science teachers when visiting neighboring schools for FFA events. Some of the most valuable time at annual conferences and even the National FFA Convention is the time spent in impromptu conversations among teachers about current happenings and the wisdom of practice. While networking as professional development is important within our own profession, so, too, is networking with other teachers in other disciplines in career and technical education and the core academic areas. In order to pursue rigorous and relevant instruction in agricultural sciences, as agriculture teachers, we must make advances toward other disciplines in order to engage them in conversations and networking about quality student learning and program development. We have much to share and much to gain from these kinds of dialogues. For example, recently, my father who is an agriculture teacher in Indiana called to express his dismay at his student's lack of ability in solving the basic mathematic problem of calculating the cost of production for greenhouse bedding plants and hanging baskets. His students, among which were a salutatorian and other academically gifted students, could not calculate the volume of soil required to fill pots, compare that volume with the volume of potting soil contained in a purchased bag of soil, or figure the cost of a single plant from a purchase list of plants. At the end of the class period, the salutatorian commented, Mr. …