Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL)

by Ben Casteel   --  Lemurs are the world’s most endangered mammal.  All species of lemur come from one large, isolated island – Madagascar; however, you don’t have to necessarily travel across the globe to see these fascinating creatures.  At this moment, you may be wondering what lemurs could possibly have in common with the training and development of our agriculture workforce.  Actually, there is a lot to learn about lemurs and agriculture, but today we will be examining how the engagement of students with these exotic animals is helping to close the gap in needed employability skills . In last month’s AWT4CL blog post, we heard from esteemed colleague Heather Butler about Facilitating Field Trips and Guest Speaker Sessions for Effective Student Learning and how building in extra time in the planning phase helps to facilitate a truly great field trip.  Over the past few years, I have witnessed students gaining even deeper insight and opportunity for gr...

By Heather Butler  --  Field trips and guest speakers are a wonderful tool for enhancing course content. They expose the students to real-world applications of the course, as well as introducing them to professionals in the field, which in turn creates informal networking opportunities between the students and the presenters ( Ji et al., 2021 ). However, I have learned over the years through many, many field trips and guest speakers that the experience is only as valuable as the preparation invested before the event. As much as I enjoy connecting students with guest speakers and organizing the events, the effectiveness in my earlier years was very hit-or-miss in terms of student responsiveness and the kinds of questions they asked. Some classes were very gregarious and asked the speakers meaningful, in-depth questions, while other classes were quite timid and unresponsive. In the latter situations, I felt badly for the speakers because it appeared my students were not intere...

by Heather Butler --  I teach a 4-credit Dendrology course at Virginia Western Community College , which includes a 3-credit lecture and 1-credit lab. The lecture takes place in a traditional college classroom and covers tree physiology and forest ecology. The lab, however, is field-based and entails weekly field trips to forested areas where students learn to identify the common and Latin names of 100+ trees and shrubs native to the central Appalachia. I based the class on  Virginia Tech’s field Dendrology lab  developed by Dr. John Seiler. He still teaches at VT and was my instructor when I studied forestry. Each week, students learn to identify and properly name 8-10 new species, which are then added to a growing list of potential items on lab quizzes. Weekly quizzes are given at the beginning of each field lab, and the species add up quickly. If students aren’t engaged and practicing from the beginning, they can easily get overwhelmed, making it difficult to catch u...