Technical agriculture skills teachers need to teach courses in the animal systems pathway

Authors

  • Trent Wells Murray State University
  • Jay Solomonson Illinois State University
  • Mark Hainline Sam Houston State University
  • Bryan Rank Arkansas Tech University
  • Matthew Wilson Arkansas Tech University
  • Skyler Rinker Iowa State University
  • Steven Boot Chumbley Texas A&M University-Kingsville

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5032/jae.v64i3.117

Keywords:

technical agriculture, skills, animal

Abstract

Fundamentally, agricultural teacher education programs and their faculty are tasked with preparing competent teachers capable of teaching students enrolled in public schools. As part of their design, an important facet of these programs is ensuring pre-service teachers are ready to provide educational opportunities in aspects of school-based agricultural education (SBAE), including teaching technical agriculture skills to students. We used a three-round Delphi technique to identify the technical agriculture skills SBAE teachers in Illinois and Iowa need to effectively teach courses in the Animal Systems pathway within the broader Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources (AFNR) Career Cluster. Thirty-four SBAE teachers who were nominated by state-level SBAE leaders and other SBAE teachers in their states contributed data for our study. Twenty-two teachers participated in all three rounds. In total, we identified 35 technical agriculture skill items. To help ensure teachers are competent and prepared to teach courses in the Animal Systems pathway, we outline several approaches agricultural teacher educators should contemplate: (1) facilitating opportunities to foster technical agriculture skill development within agricultural teacher education programs, (2) collaborating with agricultural faculty who teach technical agriculture courses to pre-service teachers, and (3) using our list of 35 skills to facilitate future scholarly investigation on the topic. While not generalizable beyond the SBAE teachers in these two states, we do believe our findings have value for SBAE stakeholders. To overcome the limitation of generalizability and to delve deeper into teachers’ technical agriculture skill needs, we suggest that our study be replicated in other states.

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Published

2023-09-30

How to Cite

Wells, T., Solomonson, J., Hainline, M., Rank, B., Wilson, M., Rinker, S., & Chumbley, S. (2023). Technical agriculture skills teachers need to teach courses in the animal systems pathway. Journal of Agricultural Education, 64(3), 158–175. https://doi.org/10.5032/jae.v64i3.117

Issue

Section

Journal of Agricultural Education

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