Author: Nicole Breazeale
Planning Unit: Community & Leadership Development
Major Program: Local Food System Development and Mapping
Outcome: Intermediate Outcome
The project brings together the farmer networks and interviewing/storytelling capacities of Black Soil (Ashley Smith) and Need More Acres Farm (Michelle Howell) with the technical expertise of Agricultural Education (Stacy Vincent & Dallas Cooks) and Community Development Extension (Nicole Breazeale) at UK. It is funded by a $80,000 Southern SARE Professional Development Program grant (Breazeale-SUB00002624) and a $2500 Food Connection Student Opportunity Grant.
The project involves developing an interactive curriculum and providing professional development to equip middle school agriculture educators and 4-H Agents at KSU and UK to teach about inclusive local food systems. Employing a storytelling pedagogy, we developed ten lessons built around digital stories that center black Kentucky farmers and a racially diverse array of local food systems professionals. Youth ages 11-14 are the target audience for this curriculum. As they move through the lessons and collaborate on a social action project, they gain knowledge about local food system, but also learn to appreciate the value of diversity while taking steps to build an inclusive and sustainable system. The project also seeks to expose Kentucky youth to a range of career paths in agriculture and local foods.
This last year, the project was piloted broadly across the state. On July 20, 2023, the curriculum was introduced to middle school agriculture educators at the annual Kentucky CTE conference during a two-hour workshop. Teachers were introduced to the videos and lessons and had an opportunity to try out activities and explore how the content and conversation might develop differently in light of the needs and lived experiences of differently positioned youth in their classrooms. 11 educators attended the training. 10/11 rated the training “very good” and noted they learned “a lot” about how to educate youth about inclusive local food systems. On December 19, 2023, a similar half-day workshop was provided for 4-H Agents in Lexington. 7 agents attended the training. 75% of attendees rated the workshop as “very good” and 25% as “good.”
In total, 7 Agriculture Educators and 4 Extension Agents piloted the curriculum, reaching more than 1200 students around the state. Evaluation results from the 6 teachers and 4 agents who filled out the pre-test and post-test and participated in focus groups are summarized below. The agriculture education version of the curriculum is available at: https://cld.ca.uky.edu/food-farming-and-community. The 4-H version is going through revisions and peer review before it is released and shared more broadly. A UK Now story on the project will be published in the coming weeks.
Agriculture Education
Teacher/school/county demographics (population size: 6 middle school teachers):
4-H Agents
Educator/student demographics (population size: 4 Agents):
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