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...

by Adam O'Neal -- Based on input from a cohort of agriculture faculty from around Virginia, an Agriculture and Food Systems Peer Group has been constituted by the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) to serve the needs of agriculture program faculty around the Commonwealth of Virginia. Peer groups have existed for other disciplines for some time, but none for this area of study until now. From the shared experiences of the Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) cohort members and other agriculture faculty, we understand that collaboration at professional levels has proven challenging. This peer group promises potential benefits to agriculture faculty in unraveling professional challenges and related classroom and teaching concerns. Agriculture is the largest private industry in Virginia, with over 43,000 farms contributing to $82.3B a year in economic impact (Virginia Farm Bureau, n.d.). Though a number of Virginia Community College System ( V...

  by Celeste Carmichael -- Gamification is a known program design approach used to provide motivation for students and participants to complete tasks - offering visual, virtual, and sometimes tangible rewards and validation of learning. In recent years, and particularly with the broader adoption of e-learning and hybrid work in higher education, experimentation and documentation of gamification as a part of classroom pedagogy has grown .  Beyond content transfer, can this same strategy be used to connect relevant past experiences for students to current classroom learning? Some faculty from the Virginia Community College System involved in the Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) are applying these approaches to help students to bridge informal and formal learning experiences, connecting the dots on experiences that can translate to valuable workforce attributes. The AWT4CL cohort members have noted that digital badges used in this way can he...

by Samson Adeoye -- What comes to mind when you think of affordable education, workforce training, flexible education paths, transfer opportunities, local community impact, and diversity? Community colleges are perhaps your foremost thoughts. They are carriers and deliverers of such possibilities in a single package ( American Association of Community Colleges, 2022 ; Kolesnikova, 2009 ; Warner 2022 ). Community colleges are two-year colleges, originally called junior colleges, and have their origin knit into the fabric of the US education system as far back as the Morrill Act of 1862 which established Land Grant Universities ( Dury, 2003 ). Investigating students’ motivations and outcomes, Strada Education Foundation conducted research on the value of community colleges to understand how these specialized groups of educational institutions can better serve their purpose to students. The researchers collected data across the US from alumni of community colleges who graduate...