Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL)

by Curt Friedel -- One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is to find the websites offering the year in pictures. As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and tells a story of significant events of the past year. Sometimes, the pictures are associated with a newsworthy event; sometimes, the picture is a colorful and beautiful moment. It seems like each picture offers a glimpse of our humanity, and sometimes our inhumanity. Pictures offer a great opportunity to reflect on what we can be proud of, and what we could do better or different. Some great websites for seeing the year-in-pictures include: CNN - https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/specials/year-in-pictures/ The Associated Press - https://apnews.com/article/photos-2023-yearend-photography-ap-0a62ee84672da7a03685c5f5f64f2c47 Time - https://time.com/6337364/top-100-photos-2023/ Reuters - https://www.reuters.com/pictures/pictures-year-2023-2023-11-28/ What does your year of pictures look like? Maybe you ta...

by Dr. Mallory White -- To weave workforce readiness skills into a traditional agriculture classroom can be a little challenging. My first-year animal science class tackled four of the twelve AWT4CL employability learning/digital badges. This blog discusses how we did it, challenges and possible lessons for the instructor and the student, and overall perception of the digital badges.  How We Did It   First, I set aside one lab period to discuss the project and complete many of the in-class activities. This required me to combine two traditionally separate, short labs into one to free up a week, but I was determined to make room for important employability content . The activities from each digital badge created by the badge authors are short and effective, but I wanted the students to do more in order to earn a badge. As an instructor, it can be difficult to come up with new, creative activities in the limited time we have. As I was rushing to come up with additional activ...