Perceptions Of Relationships Between Global Issues And School Based Agricultural Education Instruction By Agricultural Education Pre Service Candidates In Service Educators And Teacher Educators

Global learning began as an expanded approach to world studies and in recent decades has taken on the role of studying both global concepts and issues. The integration of global learning into comprehensive education will help prepare globally competent individuals to join the workforce. Recent studies have called for a targeted approach using specific subsets of global learning like Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). The United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a tool launched in 2015, has gained standing throughout higher education as a framework for addressing ESD and global competency. Studies have documented SDG value in organizing global learning instruction as well as the ability of the SDGs to assist in indicating progress towards addressing global issues. While SDGs are becoming a familiar resource at the post-secondary level, recent recommendations have suggested introduction of the SDGs earlier in secondary education to encourage the development of globally competent graduates, and as it pertains to graduates entering agricultural industries, individuals ready to work in global systems. Gaps exist in the literature that describe the levels of awareness, perceived importance, and perceived utility of SDGS by current school-based educators and pre-service candidates preparing to become school-based agricultural educators. Additionally, background experiences that have been cited as pathways for global competency improvement have not been investigated for their contribution to increased confidence and self-efficacy in agricultural educators to integrate global issues into their instruction. To address the gaps in the literature and add to the knowledge base for agricultural educators, a mixed methods study was initiated with two aims: (a) Describe the design and delivery of global issues in agriculture classrooms and (b) Identify influences on how and why global issues are integrated in agriculture classrooms. The first phase consisted of a qualitative exploration of sentiments from agricultural teacher educators to inform a quantitative approach in phase two. Four distinct themes emerged from the review and coding of the transcripts from the agricultural teacher educators (n=8): Theme 1 - Personal Perceptions, Theme 2 - Pedagogical Design, Theme 3 - Education Systems, and Theme 4 - Barriers. Each theme was converted into a series of questions within the quantitative instrument and supplemented by questions from a review of the related literature. The survey instrument "Perceptions of Global Issues" was distributed to three populations along the agricultural teacher education continuum: pre-service school-based agricultural education student teaching candidates (n=210), in-service school-based agricultural educators (n=423), and agricultural teacher educators (n=63). Results from the analysis indicate low levels of awareness, importance, and implementation of issues related to SDG's 6 "Clean Water and Sanitation", 14 "Life Below Water", and 16 "Peace Justice, and Strong Institutions", with large discrepancies between importance and implementation found in SDG 6. SDG 4 "Quality Education" was identified in all three populations as the SDG raking highest in each category and featured the smallest discrepancy. Further investigation identified numbers of individuals who participated in a select set of background experiences that possibly contribute to global competency, Significant differences in confidence to teach with global issues integrated into instruction existed between groups who did and did not participate in each experience. Future work should be conducted to determine the influence teacher preparation has on global issues instruction.