Agricultural Education In All Its Forms

My time in college has helped me to develop an interest in all three kinds of agricultural education: formal, non-formal, and informal. I remember feeling confused when I started learning about the different kinds, but I've since come to appreciate them for the different yet equally important ways they make an impact, and maybe you will too :).

Formal: School Based Agricultural Education (SBAE) is the primary aspect I've written about in this blog so far and is the main path I will be prepared for with my PSU Agricultural and Extension Education degree. This path integrates the three-component model to provide students with a comprehensive agricultural education, ending in a high school diploma for secondary students. An agricultural course of study at the university level would also fall in this category. 

Non-Formal: Now is where it gets a bit more tricky to distinguish. Non-formal education happens within the context of a specific program but does not necessarily lead to an official certification. Extension education is one of the best examples of non-formal education. Trained Extension Educators put on various programs in farmer training programs and community education events that provide necessary training outside of a formal school-based diploma/degree program. Non-formal does not mean unorganized or unofficial by any stretch - these programs often provide continuing education credits or certificates for completion. I've benefited from these many times to keep my Private Pesticide Applicators license active (I initially earned this permit in my high school plant science class - the categories fit together well :)

Informal: This category happens around kitchen tables, down grocery store aisles, in cars driving past fields and pastures, and anywhere informed members of the agricultural industry go. Just as it sounds, informal education happens anytime a person educates another about agriculture. A general sense of agricultural literacy is so important for all consumers, and this happens outside of schools and extension programs every day. Each one of us has a role to play in sharing what we know AND continuing to learn more about the industry and people in it who provide for our needs.

Since I've spent most of my time discussing formal Agricultural Education, I thought I would use this blog to highlight an experience I had in non-formal/informal education. While this experience primarily focused on teaching English rather than Agricultural Science in coordination with a PSU Extension program, it just so happened that I learned a great deal as the student in informal education about life on a local dairy farm. 

During this past fall semester, I had a chance to take the CED 497: Community Engagement with PA Farmworkers course. In this course, I was paired with a worker on a local dairy farm to help teach English once a week. My partner had worked for the past 11 years on the dairy farm in Centre Hall, PA, and each week our class loaded up in a van and traveled to the farm to have our lessons. This experience was incredibly fulfilling - I made good friends in the experience and got to learn a great deal from someone who had made a significant sacrifice to provide for their family.

In this experience, I learned so much about the role of migrant workers in the US dairy industry. Much of the work that takes place on larger dairy farms across the country is done by migrant workers, a large proportion of them coming from Mexico and Latin America. There is a significant labor shortage of employees from the US willing and able to do the work on dairy farms, so many international workers without access to quality jobs in their home countries will make the trip to the United States. These workers take on considerable risk to come to America and face many legal hurdles in addition to the costly and physically demanding nature of the trip north.

Before taking this course, I did not fully grasp the complex nature of our agricultural workforce - specifically how large a role migrant workers fill in the industry. While the US does have an H-2A visa program that provides legal avenues for seasonal agricultural workers, dairy farming is not seasonal work. There is a true lack of legal options for people looking to come to US to work in more permanent agricultural jobs, and yet there is no easy solution to these kinds of challenges.

While I gained a great deal of valuable experience as an educator by teaching English related to life and work on the farm, I learned so much from my language learning partner about speaking Spanish and working on a dairy farm. On our last lesson, our partners got to show us around the farm and tell us about what they do at work. Overall, this course reinforced my passion for agricultural education, gave me a new love for language learning and teaching English, and inspired me with a long-term vision of working to ensure people across the world have access to jobs in their home countries so that no one is forced to leave their families to provide for them. There are no easy solutions to many of these problems, but this course showed me how each category of agricultural education can be used to make a positive difference one small step at a time.

That's it for now. The word on the street is that we will receive word on our official student teaching placements sometime this week or next, so I will be looking forward to that over the next few days :). Enjoy this beautiful springtime weather!