The State of the Profession: STEM in Agricultural Education

Abstract

Recently, the agricultural education profession has advocated its relationship with STEM education. Agricultural education has been identified as an effective context to support the components of STEM through analysis of data from student and teacher attitudes and results of experiments and quasi-experiments. However little attention has been paid to the attitudes and behaviors of agricultural education faculty. Therefore, the purpose of this research study was to describe the attitudes and self-identified STEM supportive behaviors of agricultural education faculty (n = 112). Generally, agricultural education faculty held positive attitudes toward STEM in agricultural education programs. However, differences existed between land-grant and nonland-grant faculty as well as faculty holding STEM appointments and those without. Agricultural education faculty engaged in teaching and programming behaviors which support STEM in agricultural education but, differences between STEM-appointed faculty and non-STEM appointed faculty were found. Recommendations were made to encourage teacher educators to facilitate partnerships with faculty at other institutions to maximize the impact of the profession on student learning in STEM and agricultural education. Future research should be conducted to identify promising practices which engage non-STEM appointed faculty in STEM supportive behaviors and research.