As our population continues to grow, the demand of a more efficient agriculture system heightens. We work to produce the highest yield possible to cover demands. Are we compromising our water quality for mass food production? In past years, the West Coast growers had been facing increasing struggles to farm with their allotted water often turning…

The purpose of this study was to explore school-based agricultural education (SBAE) teacher beliefs about personalized instruction and blended teaching and their experiences with implementing personalized learning within their blended teaching practice. The specific research questions that guided our study were 1) What are SBAE teachers' beliefs…

Complex career decisions, such as teacher mobility, are often reduced to stigmatizing labels that do little to account for the state of teaching as a profession or credit those engaging in migratory decisions as making healthy career choices. Through our study, we focused on understanding workforce mobility, teaching as an unstaged profession, and…

Purpose: This study sought to investigate how secondary agriculture teachers' characteristics influence their perceived ability to teach students decision-making skills. Design/Methodology/Approach: We used a cross-sectional survey research design and distributed the instrument to secondary agriculture teachers in the U.S. via Facebook. We…

In a struggle to cope with school closures and shifting instructional paradigms from face-to-face to virtual, agriculture teachers across the United States were drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We sought to understand how early-career agriculture teachers (ECATs) in California reflected on their teaching experience before and during…

The topic of professionalism in school-based agricultural education is widely discussed in California yet exceedingly subjective in nature. Agricultural education adds another layer of complexity when considering professionalism across the tripartite components of classroom, leadership development (FFA), and supervised agricultural experience.…

Land Grant Institutions (LGIs) and Cooperative Extension were founded to bring educational access to the states they serve. In contrast to this mission and the ubiquitous nature of Extension services in US counties, Extension offices can only be found in a small number of indigenous communities. Despite these inequities, there are Extension…

A teacher shortage continues to plague the SBAE profession. While this shortage has been quantified and explored from the perspective of individual teachers, little research has taken a systemic approach to the problem of the SBAE teacher shortage. We posit the teacher shortage problem as inextricably linked to a convoluted job description and…

This paper presents findings from a survey of 34 food policy councils (FPCs) in California. The survey addressed organizational structure and functions, policy priorities and achievements, and the use of research or other information. We find that most FPCs have formed in recent years, operate with small budgets and limited or no staff, and…

The global COVID-19 pandemic caused immediate and intense changes throughout education, including a reliance on remote instruction. For school-based agricultural education (SBAE) teachers, who rely on experiential and hands-on learning, the changes brought about by COVID-19 required a dramatic pivot in their work responsibilities. The changing…

Employers and labor organizations in the United States use apprenticeships to provide workers with technical education and paid on-the-job training leading to wage increases and higher-skilled jobs. When English learners participate in apprenticeships, employers benefit from an expanded pipeline of qualified employees and a more diverse workforce,…

Nationally, both science and agricultural education professional organizations have identified agriculture as a fundamental technology to be studied by students, with the goal of achieving an understanding of the agri-food system necessary for democratic participation. Benchmarks representing the content that K-12 children need to understand about…

This article describes the Citrus Variety Collection with its curator, Tracy L. Kahn. The collection has two trees each of 1,010 citrus types. They stand in row after row on 22 acres at one edge of the University of California campus at Riverside and serve as a resource for research and a safeguard for diversity. Citrus is a key crop in…

During the interwar period, California's labor-intensive agriculture transitioned from reliance on diverse immigrants to preference for Mexicans. Political movements to restrict immigration, the Great Depression, and labor unrest compelled farm employers to search for labor that could be used flexibly and deported easily. To achieve this…

Agricultural literacy of K-12 students is a national priority for both scientific and agricultural education professional organizations. Development of curricula to address this priority has not been informed by research on what K-12 students understand about the agri-food system. While students' knowledge of food and fiber system facts have been…