Agricultural Education Across the Globe!

Well hello there!!

Thank you for following this blog because I am so excited to share my Korean agriculture education experiences with the rest of the world!!  How did I decide to embark on this epic journey you ask?  Well you see, I was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania and have been involved in agriculture my entire life.  Growing up, I worked on our fruit and vegetable farm, showed Boer goats and market animals in 4-H and FFA, and also did about every Career Development Event (CDE), leadership conference, and field trip possible with the FFA in my high school career.  With such a strong ag background and my great experiences in my high school agriculture education program, I decided the I wanted to shape the lives of the next generation of agriculturalists and here I am finishing up my time at Penn State to be an ag teacher!

I am so excited to say that I recently graduated and am ready to start the next chapter of my life out in the real world!  Well, almost that is...  Prior to the spring semester, I learned about this amazing opportunity to travel to South Korea to learn about secondary agriculture education!  Even though I knew it would be a tough semester balancing student teaching and class, I decided that this rural farm boy needed some world travel under my belt and that is how I decided to go on this trip!

Each and every one of our 10 class session filled my head with more and more questions that I want answered.  Do agriculture teachers in Korea try to be student centered like here in the United States?  Do students still have Supervised Agricultural Experiences that they are involved with during their education?  What is the curriculum like?  Do they teach about traditional agriculture subjects or is there also wildlife and natural resources in there curriculum as well?  What is life in Korea like?  How is the culture different there?  And so so many more questions!

I guess there is only one way to find out the answers to these questions!  Please stay tuned for continuous posts from my classmates and I as we engage in this unprecedented agriculture education study abroad trip!


Doug