UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A project aimed at helping prepare undergraduate students to serve as future agricultural educators has received $750,000 in renewed funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

The project — known as the Global Orientation to Agricultural Learning, or GOALs, program — is a collaboration among Penn State, the University of Idaho and 1890 land-grant institutions that gives undergraduate students a chance to have real life experiences in formal teaching settings.

GOALs is an initiative of the Global Teach Ag Network (GTAN), an organization cofounded by Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences professors Daniel Foster and Melanie Miller Foster to empower educators to connect students to global issues in food, fiber and natural resources.

“We founded the Global Teach Ag Network to address the growing challenges of food insecurity by connecting educators globally to do our part in building a stronger, more innovative agricultural education system,” said Miller Foster, associate teaching professor of international agriculture. “Pre-service agricultural educators need to experience diverse agricultural contexts to understand the complexities of global food security.”

She added that by immersing students in different cultural, environmental and economic settings, they have the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the issue of food insecurity and to develop the teaching skills necessary to prepare their future students for the challenges of our global agricultural system.

Daniel Foster, associate professor of agricultural and extension education, emphasized the cascading impact teachers have on society.

“Educators have capacity for influencing positive change through their communities, one student and one class at time,” he said. “Investing in the development of educators truly provides opportunity for generational transformative change as we collectively work to address the 17 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals that frame the critical issues of our society.”

Mia Sullivan, lead instructor for GOALs, expressed the need for globally aware educators, citing a teacher shortage across the U.S. but also specifically in agriculture.

“Agriculture is such an important field here in Pennsylvania and across the country, so the fact that we have a gap there is alarming,” said Sullivan, a doctoral candidate in education, development and community engagement, with a dual title in international agricultural development. “We're expected to feed upwards of 10 billion people by the year 2050, with less land than we had accessible 50 years ago. And only 2% of the U.S. population is in production agriculture, like farming. So, with those types of numbers, we need to have people interested in being in the agricultural field, especially people to be the teachers of that.”

The GOALs curriculum is evidence-based, pulling from international hubs of ag research and food security support, such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme, the World Food Prize Foundation and the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology.

Since 2021, the GOALs program has instructed a yearly cohort of preservice educators on global agricultural education through online classes and three distinct, high-impact “immersion experiences,” including a chance to teach a junior high or high school class for one week during spring semester.

In the fall, GOALs students learn key concepts about food security and what it means to be a global citizen. In the spring, participants learn how to apply these concepts in the classroom. They create lesson plans, tackle concepts such as conflict management and student engagement, and eventually teach middle or high school students.

Brandon Bixler — a Penn State and GOALs alumnus, a current intern for GTAN, and a new agricultural science educator in Lancaster — noted that in an age that is becoming more diverse and globalized than ever, it is essential that educators are equipped to prepare their students for a more interconnected world.

“While I always have more to learn, I absolutely left the GOALs program more prepared to work in a globalized environment,” Bixler said. “For students graduating high school and going on to postsecondary education or the workforce, it's important for them to understand the global impacts of the work that they do. Having teachers who are prepared to help their students see that and who can facilitate those kinds of learning experiences, it's hard to put a price tag on that. I can't overstate the value that GOALs had in the overall picture of preparing me for what comes next now that I've graduated from Penn State.”

Bixler added that one of his takeaways from GOALs was that many times, global action begins locally.

“One of the themes I value most is that students coming out of this program understand the global implications of agriculture within the U.S. and within their home communities,” he said. “The course is very real about the fact that we can't address all of the challenges we see — like food security, poverty and global resource management — but in our role as educators, we can think about doing what we can, with what we have, where we are, to address what we can.”

Travel is a foundational portion of the GOALs program, and students have multiple opportunities to have teaching experiences outside of their hometowns. In the fall, they attend the Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue, a three-day conference hosted by the World Food Prize Foundation where the world’s experts in agriculture and resource management meet.

Then, during the spring immersion, students put their newly learned skills to the test at schools across the United States. Bixler — who was assigned to a high school in Barrett, Minnesota — said he was very fulfilled by the opportunity to gain practical experience.

“Minnesota was sort of the capstone of my time in the GOALs program,” Bixler said. "It was a snowy spring break in central Minnesota with an impending storm, which made for an interesting spring break. At the time, a lot of my friends were headed to the beach while I and my teaching partner were headed to teach high schoolers for a week. It was hard work, a sacrifice at times, but it was also a very affirming experience for me that, yes, this is hard work, but it's work that matters.”

New to the program this year, Sullivan said, was an optional summer immersion in Belize. The focus of this trip was to look at agriculture and conservation education in the context of indigenous knowledge and food security. Participants explored the cultural connections and history of the Maya, Garifuna, Creole and Latin American peoples and their practices in agriculture, conservation and food security.

Part of this trip involved running workshops with students from Independence Junior College, located in the Stann Creek District in Belize, regarding ag and conservation issues. To continue incorporating teaching aspects, the students from GOALs and IJC taught high schoolers through games and lectures about what they learned from the day before.

“I'm sitting there in 111-degree weather,” Sullivan recalled, “and they're all just having the best time. Engaging and empowering preservice teachers and professionals, no matter the weather or circumstance in agriculture, is what this program is all about."

Those interested in learning more about the GOALs program can visit the GTAN website. Ideas regarding how the program can connect educators to this type of work can be directed to Daniel Foster at foster@psu.edu.