Interactive ag education

“To be honest with you, I never planned to get into teaching,” says Grace Ogden, Assistant Professor of Agronomy at East Texas A&M. “I really appreciated the science. I appreciated being in agriculture. The teaching just kind of came with other parts of the job. But it's actually ended up being my favorite part of what I do.”

Many professors get some kind of teaching experience while in graduate school. But Ogden was able to get a unique experience developing curriculum under her Ph.D. adviser, Dr. Beatrix Haggard, at Oklahoma State University. 

“Beatrix was my undergrad adviser, and I really liked her teaching. When I went to look for a Ph.D. program, she said, ‘Hey, I would love to have you as a Ph.D. student. I just got this grant. I need a Ph.D. student to take on this curriculum piece. Are you interested?’ And I was like, ‘I get to work with you on it. So yeah, sure, absolutely.’”

Ogden’s lesson plans are hands-on and centered on active learning, often pairing lectures with field trips to farms and research stations. This hands-on aspect of her classes has followed her from graduate school to her current position at East Texas A&M, where she teaches a variety of classes including intro to plant science, soil science, forage and pasture crops, and weed science. 

Both Ogden and East Texas A&M value experiential learning, an approach to teaching that makes students active participants in the learning process.

“We're really focused on experiential learning for our students and equipping them with skills that are directly transferable to the workforce,” says Ogden, adding that she often adds extra educational material into her lesson plans based off of what kinds of jobs her students want after graduation. “One of the things I learned during my Ph.D. experience was to approach a lot of teaching backwards. What do you want your students to learn at the end of the day? Start there and engineer backwards.”

If a student wants to earn a pesticide applicator license? Ogden incorporates those skills into her weed science class. And if a student wants to work at a dairy? Ogden incorporates lessons on silage into her forage and crop science class. Conversations with her students drive her class curriculum—Ogden is grateful that her student engagement is pretty high.

The goal of experiential learning is to learn by doing. But what if you can’t bring your students outside to a farm or a community garden? 

In a general education, undergraduate soil science lab, Ogden and her colleague, Michaela Bledsoe (interim instructor of the soil science lab), used an activity inspired by Ogden’s Ph.D. work to get students excited about all things dirt. 

Integrating art and science

“Visuals can be really powerful: Whether we are creating them, using them for our own memories and note taking, or interacting with a piece of art,” says Randa Jabbour, Professor of Agroecology at the University of Wyoming. Jabbour teaches many courses in plant science and has recently started incorporating art museum pieces into her curriculum. She coauthored a paper in Natural Science Education about her experiences and takeaways from these initial lessons.

Jabbour believes that these days, collaboration between art and the sciences is “something people strive for.” Existing efforts (such as cross-disciplinary initiatives like Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics; STEAM) aim to increase creative thinking, create better lesson plans, and illustrate how science and engineering impact everyday life. And this integration is for good reason: There have been studies showing how experiential learning through art can help increase a student’s understanding of natural history and taxonomy, among other disciplines. 

Museums are ideal places to combine science with the arts, but despite this, there have not been many attempts by science teachers to utilize art museum collections as a resource, says Jabbour. “This kind of specific way of working with an art museum and the objects they have—I just felt like it could be so generalizable, as long you have that partner in the museum,” she says, adding that this generalizability was the main reason for her desire to publish this material: “We weren’t just going to keep doing this in our own little nook.”

While many people think a museum’s main purpose is informal education or outreach, Jabbour hopes to extend this reach and utilize these collections for formal education. “It was eye-opening to me many years ago to meet someone from the university's art museum and realized that they wanted to work with us too,” she says. “The art museum here, they're here for everyone.”

Jabbour’s goal was to use an object-based learning (OBL) approach to teaching, which utilizes some kind of primary resource (like a painting or a drawing) to drive discussion. She collaborated with coauthor Raechel Cook (then a University of Wyoming Art Museum educator) because of the museum’s many artworks depicting food systems. The two instructors tasked undergraduate students in an introductory agriculture science class with analyzing and writing extended labels for art pieces that aligned with themes in Jabbour’s lectures.

Extended labels serve various purposes, such as providing more information about an artist, adding historical context, or discussing compelling artistic qualities of a piece. The coauthors wanted Jabbour’s students to use extended labels to add agronomic context surrounding the art pieces; in turn, the students got a chance to practice science communication for a general audience and dive deeper into themes of plant, soil, and animal science. “It's really an opportunity from an agricultural literacy standpoint,” says Jabbour. “To me, it was an interesting way to bring this kind of agriculture conversation into a space where that's not usually the primary focus amongst artists.”

Whether the students were knowledgeable about cattle health, farm equipment, or plants, they all had a chance to bring their perspective to the museum collection. The artworks—some of which are depicted here—covered a diversity of both agricultural topics and artistic media. 

"Frog Sandwich, by artist David Gilhooly, is a representation of the future of food and how one can find joy, sustainability, and the true meaning of balance in agriculture. The concept of a frog as an edible protein may be unfamiliar to some cultures but considered the norm for other cultures. We are led to think about how we can redefine what a 'normal' meal may look like in the wake of climate change.” 

^{—Extended label by Kai Forbis, Drea Hineman, and Maggie Kougl, University of Wyoming.}

Deep looking—careful observation connects art and science

“Even though our disciplines seem very different, what we have in common is this idea of the importance of careful observation or what my art colleagues called deep looking,” says Jabbour. 

Sitting alone with a piece of art—even just for three minutes—can feel like an incredible exercise in diligence and attention. It’s a skill that these students will also need if they want to pursue any career that requires careful observation. For example, plant scientists need to be able to sit with a specimen for a long time, diagnosing its insect damage, disease, or nutrient deficiencies.

“One of my diagnostic colleagues who also has art training, William Stump, he was the one who said to me, ‘there's what's in the painting and then there's what's off the page,’” says Jabbour. “What’s going on in the field? Is there too much water, not enough? That was a big part of our goals, to just give students a different way to practice this careful observation. And I think some of them found that really valuable and some of them found it really hard.”

Jabbour remarks that what works for some students is perhaps more challenging for others. She says that some of her students hadn’t even been to an art museum before they took this class, so they had some uncertainty working with art—especially if they were looking at very abstract art pieces. Jabbour has a plan to improve the lab moving forward with more guided discussions and one-on-one meetings between students and the instructors.

Training the next generation of scientists

Determined, Jabbour will continue to integrate her science classes with art to show her students “an authentic representation of how science works” and connect them to new ways of thinking. 

“Science is not in a vacuum on its own. It's this process that is connected to a lot of different kinds of people who have different disciplinary expertise. And it’s embedded in community,” she says. “My main take home is just that this is another way that we can connect students to the broader community and give them a sense of what it actually is like to work as a scientist and engage with people across our disciplines and with people in our communities that may or may not see the world the way we do.” 

Whether in a lab or a museum, the two professors conclude that the best way to train our undergraduate students for their next chapter is to get them out of their seats and into a new environment. 

“The more experiential learning we do, the more we get our students engaged in this hands-on component—whether it's in the field, or in the lab, or whatever—the less time they're sitting stagnant and just listening and the more that they are physically handling something, physically doing something, in my opinion, is really good,” adds Ogden.