With the increasing globalization of companies and the workforce, specifically within the agricultural industry, educators seek to prepare workers with technical and soft skills that will allow employability in multicultural environments. Using the lens of Transformative Learning Theory and Self Determination Theory, we examined how a study abroad…

Teacher recruitment and retention in the United States has been deemed an issue across all disciplines and grade-levels. School-based agricultural education (SBAE) is no exception to this issue, where for decades a national shortage of qualified agriculture teachers has persisted. According to the 2021 Illinois Agricultural Education Annual…

Considerations around teacher attrition, supply and demand, and retention are incomplete without including teacher mobility. The problem, as it currently stands, finds SBAE ill-equipped, at the professional level, to support mobile teachers. Providing support, however, starts with understanding the population; in this case, mobile teachers. The…

Teaching awards provide faculty members external validation of their excellence in the classroom and opens pathways for leadership and research collaboration. The objective of this study was to identify barriers and facilitators experienced by faculty members during the nomination process. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 faculty…

This study was designed to understand the current state of wildlife-friendly landscape maintenance practices and the associated barriers and motivations among Florida green industry professionals. A Delphi technique to achieve consensus, along with descriptive survey questions, was used to facilitate feedback from Florida-based green industry…

While the choice to move to a new school is personal, many play a role in justifying that choice for the mobile teacher. These justifiers--or "influencers"--make up the socializing network for teachers (in this case, SBAE teachers) in new settings. Our study outlined how mobile SBAE teachers rationalize the choice to change schools and…

Mentorship is a valuable component of the growth of junior faculty, but mentorship and the mentorship network in the broadly defined agricultural education discipline is not well understood. This study describes junior faculty mentees in the discipline and their mentors, as well as the mentorship interactions, including the social network of…

Fundamentally, agricultural teacher education programs and their faculty are tasked with preparing competent teachers capable of teaching students enrolled in public schools. As part of their design, an important facet of these programs is ensuring pre-service teachers are ready to provide educational opportunities in aspects of school-based…

Utilizing Wenger's (1998) work of Communities of Practice and hermeneutic phenomenology, the purpose of this study was to examine the phenomenon of participation among alternatively certified agriculture teachers in the agriculture teacher community of practice. Two themes emerged as we interpreted the findings: (1) we're all in this together, and…

Community engagement has significant impacts on SBAE teachers' perceived opportunities to remain at their schools or in the profession at large. We wanted to better understand how interactions between teachers and their communities invoked challenge or support, particularly in helping us understand how to retain mobile teachers. Specific to this…

This longitudinal qualitative phenomenological case study seeks to understand beginning agriculture teachers' experiences and how their attitudes toward teaching evolve over time. The research included visits to the teachers' facilities, monthly interviews, reflection exercises, and focus groups. Initial coding included magnitude and in vivo…

Sources of satisfaction, stress, and burnout are all-too-familiar to school-based agricultural education (SBAE) teachers. Yet, the current literature related to SBAE stress has not addressed the overwhelming existence of trauma in our greater society. Teacher wellbeing can be compromised when students share their own adversities and traumatic…

Agriculture teachers need knowledge and skills in a range of agricultural mechanics topics, such as metal fabrication and power mechanics. Teacher professional development (PD) is one method for improving teacher competence. Both Sorensen et al. (2014) and Yopp et al. (2020) reported differences in teachers' PD needs based on years of teaching…

Instructional methods are the cornerstone of all teaching and learning strategies. This study explored instructional method use by early, middle, and later career agricultural education teachers. One-hundred nine teachers responded to an online questionnaire and were evenly split in terms of gender. Cooperative learning, demonstration, and lecture…

With the debut of SAE for All, it is imperative student growth catalyzed by supervised agricultural experiences (SAEs) be measured to understand the general efficacy of SAEs as well as the specific impact of the SAE for All initiative. In the three-component model, Classroom/Laboratory Instruction, FFA, and SAE are represented as being equal, but…