First Year Urban Agriculture Teacher's Program Philosophies

I remember my anxiety during the first week of class at Urbana High School. I was a rural kid fresh out of college starting a new program in an urban area. I would be teaching students that knew very little about conventional agriculture. Half of the students had a different skin color than me. I did not have a grand vision for the program. I knew that the learning curve would be huge. I feared failing. The first year at Urbana was long and tiresome, yet ultimately, it was one of the best of my life.Once the students bought into my program, they would not let me fail. The students and I built a program of over 100 students and had a very active FFA chapter. Our accomplishments included becoming a three-star FFA chapter and every agriculture student was a FFA member (FFA membership was not mandatory). I am proud to say that agricultural education and the FFA can and does work in urban communities.Teaching agriculture in an urban area can be a daunting challenge for those of us accustomed to rural communities. Working with students that are culturally diverse is challenging. Despite these cultural differences, an agriculture teacher raised in rural community can have great success in an urban agriculture program. My success stemmed from a few basic philosophies about students. They included: engaging my students as much as possible, building the program around students, and giving them my time. I know that these student-centered philosophies helped my students, program, and chapter achieve great things. My philosophies for teaching urban agriculture are best explained by telling some of the stories from my first year.Do Not Bore Students, Engage ThemI asked two questions of lessons I developed. Will the lesson engage students? Does the lesson bore me as the teacher? I never thought of myself as an entertainer; learning must come first. However, I wanted to excite my students to learn. I believe that active and engaged students will naturally be more excited about learning. I learned this lesson the hard way during my first semester.My first semester of Introduction to Agricultural Mechanics had to be in the classroom for an extended period of time because of broken shop equipment. I attempted to teach agricultural mechanics like I had experienced it in my home agriculture program. Students took notes, read from the book, and went through PowerPoint presentations. Students had to remain seated during the class period. I described shop time as a privilege of being a good student in my class. My students hated it and they started to take it out on me. All of us were counting down the weeks until the course would end. Thankfully the course was only a semester long. When the students finally got into the shop they were still not engaged. I decided that this course had to be drastically different in the spring semester.The fall semester finally ended and a new group of students were enrolled for the same course in the spring. I changed the curriculum drastically. The students spent as little time sitting in the classroom .as possible. Even the safely instruction occurred in the shop with hands-on instruction. I did not have them read from textbooks when they could just as easily learn it by doing. Seat time was utilized to talk about daily expectations and illustrating examples of tasks students would be doing that day. Shop time became the right of being enrolled in the class. I incorporated students' ideas into the curriculum. They were encouraged to talk and work in groups on projects. I also experienced sore feet at the end of the day, but it was worth it!The results seem obvious now; students were engaged and enjoyed the class. They became like worker bees in a beehive. My discipline problems in the second semester shrank from ten referrals to just one. We all wished the class would last an entire year and not just a semester. I adopted these same types of activities in my other classes. …