With the current emphasis on STEM education, teachers across the nation are encouraged to prepare students for careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Michele Sutton, an agricultural educator in Ithaca, NY, needed no such encouragement to engage her students in a world of possibilities through science.
Sutton teaches at the Tompkins Seneca Tioga New Visions program and her classroom is located on the Cornell University campus. While she only sees students for a single year, her intensive curriculum prepares young people not only to appreciate and understand science, but to master it to a level in which they are capable of world-class research and frequently pursue careers as agricultural scientists. In one year, Michele Sutton's students are introduced to the realities of agriculture as a career and develop the skill set to become leaders in the pursuit of scientifically based agricultural solutions.
At the recent National FFA Convention, Michele Sutton was one of only four educators nationally to be recognized as finalists in the Agriscience Teacher of the Year competition. She was identified because of her strong curriculum, the competitive nature of her program and because of the partnerships she has built between her students and researchers at Cornell University. Before graduation, each of her students will have completed an independently devised research project in cooperation with a professor at Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Students participate in the World Food Prize, tackle current global challenges such as world hunger or food safety and develop confidence in their ability to work effectively through science on behalf of a 7 billion person planet.
Michele is passionate about engaging her students in meaningful research on behalf of an industry in which she believes. As a student, Sutton studied agriculture herself and was an FFA member in Greenville, NY. Today, she runs her own FFA chapter at the TST New Visions program and serves students across the state as a member of the NYS FFA Board of Trustees and as the coordinator of the NYS FFA Agriscience Fair. She also has delivered workshops to agricultural educators throughout New York to help them engage students in the scientific aspects of agriculture and to help improve their ability to incorporate science into their curriculum.
The opportunities for science to be embedded within an agricultural curriculum are numerous. As an economic driver that includes the production, processing and distribution of products of the food, fiber and natural resources industries; agriculture faces real challenges. Population growth, urban sprawl, economic development and more result in farmers and agricultural scientists needing to produce food that is more abundant, more diverse and more nutritious. More than just food (though the challenges in food production alone present this generation of agriculturalists with the task of doubling food production by the year 2050), agriscientists are key in the pursuit and production of renewable fuels and the preservation of natural resources.
