Many students currently in preservice agricultural education teacher education programs do not have traditional agricultural backgrounds. Many of those students are experiencing skills they will be required to teach or utilize upon employment for the first and sometimes only time in introductory course work within their teacher education programs.…

Research supports the common understanding that spending enjoyable time in nature is one of the most reliable ways of reducing stress indicators such as heart rate and blood pressure. This article describes a pilot program in which the Chicago Botanic Garden leveraged nature's stress-reducing qualities to complement a program for veterans in…

Student interest in plants is lacking. Therefore, we investigated potential drivers of situational interest in cultivated plants and interactions between different dimensions of interest, i.e. topic, context and learning activity. A total of 462 high school students (14-17 years of age) rated two sets of questionnaire items combining eight plants…

Allison B. Wallace describes a seminar in organic horticulture she created and teaches as part of an honors curriculum. She answers the question of how gardening is appropriate for high-ability college students by saying that she believes efforts to raise plants by relatively non violent means teaches and disciplines students in an ethical way to…

Most educational programs are designed to produce lower level outcomes, and Extension educators are challenged to produce behavior change in target audiences. Social norms are a very powerful proven tool for encouraging sustainable behavior change among Extension's target audiences. Minor modifications to program content to demonstrate the…

Recruitment and support processes in sustainability-profiled incubators have received little research attention. The article addresses this knowledge gap in an empirical investigation of three sustainability-oriented incubators in Sweden, Finland and Germany. The data are based on interviews with managers, stakeholders and tenants in Green Tech…

This practical lesson on greenhouses implements standards of the Next Generation Science Standards ("K-2 ETS I-2"; "K-LS1-1") and the preschool objectives from the Teaching Strategies GOLD. Teaching Strategies GOLD is an assessment tool available online and in print that can be used with any developmentally appropriate early…

In recent years, many schools have taken up food gardening. This is a welcome trend, but it has had to be conducted as an extracurricular activity, often with the help of, or run by, parents and grandparents. Growing vegetables and fruit, if it is to be done well, is a complex activity. The potential good outcomes for health, learning, and…

Experiential learning is invaluable when promoting interdisciplinary approaches to teaching complex issues. This article reports on a five-week collaboration between undergraduate students in social work and landscape architecture courses, project impetus being a common-reading text. Students (n=54) constructed three-dimensional models of…

MG SPROUTS was developed as a "project-in-a-box" program, a self-contained educational programming tool for Extension agents working with master gardener Extension volunteers (MGEVs). The program design incorporates programmatic materials and project management materials and follows best management practices for volunteer management. MG…

Re-embedding foodways in local communities and ecologies is an enormous undertaking that is supported in part through a myriad of educational processes. For niche spaces of post-industrial foodways, a crucial step toward normalization is being accepted, appreciated, and even desired by the wider society. This article explores how pedagogy…

Engaging local actors in Environmental Education activities seems to be an important condition for environmental sustainability. Lack of common purpose among local and external researchers constrains the engagement. Following these insights, we implemented a participatory action research project related to tree planting as part of creating an…

This study tested the effect of four short videos appealing to environmental values on home irrigation users' intent to use good irrigation and fertilization practices. The videos were largely ineffective, and there was only a small effect on one of the behaviors within the fertilizer loss treatment group. Implications point to a need for…

The fundamental concepts employed by City as Text™ (CAT)--the established experiential learning practice in honors education-and the discipline of geography, specifically the landscape tradition within human geography, share much in common. The overlaps offer CAT practitioners additional intellectual support from a source outside of honors while…

Purpose: The goal of the current research study was to advance our knowledge of cognitive-communicative disorders following traumatic brain injury (TBI) by identifying the cognitive and communicative processes underlying narrative discourse ability. The study (1) examined the role of working memory (WM) and inferencing in narrative discourse, (2)…