Abstract
Preparing students for a globally connected world starts with giving the right tools and training to pre-service and in-service teachers and providing them with relevant competencies that are needed to create a globally connected curriculum. The globalization of agriculture means there is an emerging need for agricultural education in the United States and an increase in a globalized approach to prepare students for future agricultural careers. Teacher education programs have lagged in higher education in terms of internationalization, which could lead to teachers who feel unready to incorporate international issues.
To address this problem, the study will allow for an investigation of the global competencies for Pacific Northwest (PNW) agricultural educators and examine needs they have to be successful when integrating this global curriculum into their classrooms. The findings revealed that there were differences in the scores between the different sites and the different demographic factors between the secondary agricultural education students. An examination of the pre/posttest with Global Citizenship Scale and the Global Content Knowledge Assessment showed higher change in scores between the different grade levels and age groups between the students. The findings for the secondary agricultural educators were limited, however shed a light on how different educators scored on their pretest before delivering the instruction to their students.
From these findings, this study points to the need of the integration of global agriculture concepts in the classroom through a Global Citizenship model. There needs to be a creation of a scope and sequence model for PNW secondary agricultural educators to follow with the creation of new and relevant lesson plans and activities to incorporate into different programs. This research found that there was a significance to the implementation of this curriculum to the different sites that were selected which showed growth between the students before and after the implementation of the Global Agriculture Citizenship unit.