The application of agricultural education: How farming can enhance critical-thinking habits

Kellogg Spring Creek Farm Campus, located in Palmer, Alaska, was donated to APU by Louise Kellogg in the 1990s. Kellogg’s goal was to provide 700 acres of productive farmland, serene fields, and natural forests that could give students access to hands-on environmental education.

Ben Swimm, the current Kellogg farm manager and a student in APU’s Master of Arts Program, is using Kellogg campus to combine farming practices with his capstone research to create an agricultural education curriculum.

“My master’s degree is writing a curriculum with clear outcomes and focus, not just on farming skills but also kind of critical thinking and problem-solving skills,” Swimm said.

The Kellogg Campus is home to APU’s outdoor and environmental education master’s degree, a K-8 teacher certification program, a home school program for K-8 students, a summer camp, and a production and education farm where food is grown and sold. The campus additionally provides training for agriculture management with the Alaska Conservation Foundation and is working with the Department of Energy and University of Alaska Fairbanks to find creative solutions for mixing solar farms with agricultural production.

Swimm’s MAP research examines these programs and addresses how the interactions among agriculture, the environment, and education can be interrelated and applied to any career.

“Agriculture, I think, sometimes gets pigeonholed as a subject that is only studied in terms of food outcomes,” Swimm said. “But we don’t have students coming here to study just that. Using the farm as a laboratory for any number of other disciplines, you could have writing courses on the farm, you could have business courses on the farm—we do lots of financial stuff—you could have history or social humanities classes, or health and nutrition classes. These are all things that are super, super tied to what we’re doing.”

Swimm’s project considers how agricultural education could encourage skill growth in each of these varied programs.

“To be a farmer or to operate a farm successfully, what does it come down to?” Swimm asked himself. “It comes down to skills that you need to be successful in other areas of life as well. That is the process of critical thinking.” Swimm observed that the most needed skills on a farm were those of problem identification and solution management.

 “The farm is like a laboratory for practicing those skills that make people stronger thinkers in general and able to take that process into any career or any field of study that they have.”

You can learn more about the programs or community involvement at our Kellogg Campus and Spring Creek Farm webpage.

Article written by graduating student Laura Ditto as part of her senior project, Science in Progress: Reporting on Research at APU.