Elizabeth Allen, a biology and environmental science teacher at Clark–Shawnee High School in Ohio, has discovered the power of teaching science through agriculture. After attending a Feed the World workshop in June 2023, Allen changed her approach to teaching science.
“I have used many of the lessons from the Feed the World website,” Allen enthuses. From corn dissection to GMO speed dating and soil testing, her students engaged with various aspects of life science through agriculture.
“They were just so happy to not be taking notes or doing worksheets,” she observes, “Surprisingly, they were afraid or too germ-conscious to touch the soil much, which made me laugh but also a little sad because getting your hands in the dirt is important.”
Allen notes, “I think my big a-ha moment was that they don’t need to have a lot of background knowledge to do these lessons.” Now she embraces problem-based learning more fully, allowing students to dive into experiments and generate questions organically.
“Try the labs first yourself. If you like it, students probably will too,” Allen advises. Through these agriculture-based lessons, Allen has engaged her students more deeply with learning, potentially guiding them towards important scientific careers in agriculture.
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