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Introduction

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00021482-10795885

1533-8290

Nicole Welk-Joerger, David D. Vail,

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

Many of us reading this journal have taught agricultural history in some form. The roles of animals, crops, soil, diseases, gardens, and tractors, to only name a few, are key ingredients in understanding numerous parts of our individual and collective pasts. As a result, the venues of learning can be just as diverse as the topics' influential reach. Many of the stories we tell in our university survey classes, highly specialized graduate courses, or with students in K–12 classes include agricultural history, sometimes in quite unexpected ways for both the learner and the lecturer. Agricultural history stretches across disciplinary fields and spaces of learning, and it manifests inside formalized classrooms and outside across informal ones, often in literal fields.A key lesson, then, is that to teach agricultural history is to connect learners in visceral ways just as much as intellectual ones. Feeling freshly tilled soil or smelling a recent rain across alfalfa fields matters just as much as reading primary sources. Experiential learning plays a significant part of our agricultural history pedagogy, with the “doing” of agriculture taking various forms from reading records to reading the landscape. The authors in this forum speak to these many possibilities and the uniqueness of agriculture in its capacity to connect seemingly disparate students, researchers, disciplines, and practices.“Teaching through Agriculture” is the beginning of a much longer conversation about the processes and values of teaching the agricultural past. It is also the continuation and braiding of various recent threads of inquiry in the field, including the recent roundtable in this journal, “Why Does Agricultural History Matter?”1 Each contributor offers keen insights about how they combine intellectual and experiential learning in their classrooms and, in other cases, into their local communities. You will read about successful instruction techniques in more conventional forms, the diverse kinds of primary sources these instructors use to engage learners, and perhaps unexpected ways to integrate the past and present.Teaching has long been foundational to the mission of agricultural history. The Agricultural History Society was founded by an interdisciplinary group of historians, scientists, and economists as a space for learning, with the first members including extension agents asking how history could help anchor the relevance of traditional and new agricultural practices for their farmer-audiences.2 Over the society's history, scholarship from members has included pedagogical essays that reflect on the importance of agricultural topics in the classroom, teacher-mentors, the importance of theoretical and interdisciplinary thinking in teaching, and the use of the visceral, material elements of agriculture to ignite curiosity in learners.3 The James C. Giesen Teaching Excellence Award is just one formal recognition of the society that marks this much longer dedication to teaching in the field.The beginnings of this particular forum started at two academic conferences. The first spark came at the National Council on Public History in 2017. In that meeting, David presented on the history of agricultural science and the use of archival material in instructing STEM students and then bringing those lessons to a general public. Conversations about pedagogy continued into the 2019 Agricultural History Society meeting, where David presented work with Neil Oatsvall, Jenny Barker-Devine, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, and Margaret Weber in “The Place of Agricultural History in the History Curriculum: A Roundtable.” The scholar-teachers on this panel expanded the discussion on every educational level and encouraged us to keep carving out a space where others could join the conversation, workshop their ideas, and share teaching strategies. Nicole sat in the audience that day and later connected with David about organizing a forum for publication focused on teaching.Then COVID-19 hit. Teaching all online posed significant challenges, especially in pedagogy. We felt that this kind of forum was needed more than ever, and our next steps included issuing a call for papers for an agricultural history pedagogy workshop. Three clear interests of the group emerged: (1) the role of agricultural primary sources in framing and designing courses; (2) the use of agricultural topics in public history and community-engaged work; and (3) how the materiality of agriculture might lend itself to innovative pedagogical approaches that can take place outside, in the dirt. From there, we decided to host an online workshop in January 2022.Our call for proposals emphasized a forum for a pedagogy of agricultural history across fields. Part of this thinking had to do with the 2020–21 academic year, where many of us had to rethink our teaching in the transition to masked, outdoor, or completely virtual spaces. Effective, adaptable, engaging, inclusive teaching takes time, research, and replicability. As such, it is important to have ongoing conversations about pedagogy rooted in the future of teaching. “Teaching through Agriculture” aimed to create a virtual and textual forum about teaching in history and related interdisciplinary fields that addressed topics linked broadly to agriculture, science, or the environment.The goal of the workshop was to gather a diverse range of research, case studies, and reflections about teaching in the ever-developing field of agricultural history. And as this forum illustrates, it is ever developing. The virtual workshop included time to discuss pedagogy candidly with colleagues around the world. We also built space into the workshop to draft the pieces that would be included in this forum. The call for proposals invited participants to address teaching in any aspect of agriculture or agricultural history, including, but not limited to, experiences (whole courses or parts of classes/workshops) in archaeology and anthropology, histories of science, technology, and medicine, environmental history, animal studies, food studies, agriculture and rural life, primary school education, or FFA/4-H instruction. We especially encouraged submissions that highlighted the work and teaching of early career and/or contingent faculty, nontraditional researchers, and underrepresented scholars. We also originally focused on three central categories for analysis and discussion—activities, assessments, and assigned media—with hopes of compiling a collection of cases and tools to be used by future instructors across disciplines and educational levels. The final cohort included fourteen instructors who would contribute thirteen pieces in total.Workshop participants voiced a hunger to talk about teaching: What was working? What wasn't? What were the pressing issues of the time? How could agriculture serve as a creative connector? It was clear that agriculture was uniquely positioned to cultivate engaging, inclusive classrooms, no matter the format. Agriculture connected people across geographic and temporal scales, perhaps for the sheer reason that, as Peter Coclanis has argued many times before, food is the anchor of our history and livelihood.4 Food studies certainly lends itself to creative teaching strategies, as illustrated by leading scholar-teachers in the field experimenting with unessays, recipe archives, and in-class exercises with food.5 Such strategies needed to be retooled and reimagined in online and asynchronous spaces during the pandemic, and the “how” of these (and other) methods struck a chord with the thoughtful teachers of the “Teaching through Agriculture” workshop. How do we articulate the essence of an assignment? How do we assess its success? And how might we adopt multiple approaches—online and outdoors—into different classroom communities? It was clear that agricultural history brought different opportunities and opened numerous pedagogical possibilities.We divided the written results of this forum into three conversational sections: “Classroom Engagements,” “Fields Work,” and “Public History and Beyond.” Each takes on a different dimension of what teaching agriculture or agricultural history can look like across different kinds of classrooms, incorporating different disciplinary fields, or integrating quite literal fields—situating learning on sites and in soil.The first four contributors provide diverse examples of teaching agricultural history in the context of the “traditional” classroom through sample exercises, assessments, and assignments. The examples demonstrate the importance of digging into primary sources located in agriculture to better illustrate nuanced histories in East Asian, European, and American history.Peter Braden shares two assignments designed specifically for a commodity-driven course that balances the content of the commodity with its context as a prominent nonhuman figure and helps tell a larger East Asian history. Jeff Bremer provides the details for a primary source analysis that highlights the dimensions of gender, class, and health. Matthew Holmes recounts the importance of agricultural history in providing a scaffolding for understanding the framing and basic foundations of biology. Finally, Rebecca Kaplan reminds us to attend to the sharp social dimensions of agriculture, especially when crafting syllabi at land-grant institutions (and the archives available) with stories of settler colonialism and activist resistance in mind.Fieldwork and field work tend to blur together when the social sciences engage with topics in agriculture. The bottom line: agricultural “fields” work as sites for engaging with and learning about history.With site-based (and sometimes work-based) examples, experiential learning serves as the foundation of the pieces by Ashley Colby, Nicholas Timmerman and Abigail Carpenter, Saskia Cornes, and Cody Miller. Colby argues for the importance of international service learning opportunities for students engaged with interdisciplinary questions about sustainability. Timmerman and Carpenter also address service and site-based learning but outline the intricacies of executing a field trip with multiple institutional partners. Cornes and Miller—both situated in North Carolina—provide some detailed examples of the philosophical and pedagogical dimensions of teaching on soils that (quite literally) hold and stratify histories. Cornes speaks to engagement with the soil at Duke Campus Farm, while Miller outlines a lesson plan for students visiting Moses Cone Park.The last conversational section focuses on public history, an enormous category we use here to emphasize the applicability and adaptability of these contributions. These essays feature modes, methods, and philosophies that run parallel to ongoing conversations about integrating the digital humanities into teaching, the place of the present in teaching the past, and engagement with institutional collaborators.Camden Burd and Maria Fedorova detail two instances where hands-on activities like podcast creation (Burd) and Google Map curation (Fedorova) can help students sharpen their analytical and comprehension skills when engaging with agricultural history at local and global scales. Debra Reid reminds us of the importance of integrating historical agricultural artifacts and working alongside museums to inspire learners. Sanchia deSouza and Andrew Urban provide raw accounts where past and present cannot be disentangled and offer important theoretical and practical apparatuses that emphasize personal reflection and training in community-engaged collaborations.We hope that this forum sparks new ideas and conversations about teaching agricultural history. Each author provides key insights about their instruction, sharing the various teaching ingredients they include to make pedagogy successful while modeling approaches that can be used in numerous ways. Ultimately, this forum is meant to offer a toolkit for assignments, assessments, course designs, and philosophies of teaching that come from agriculture. This collection of essays is just a start, and we are eager see what the future holds. As you'll see, most of us are teaching agricultural history, even if we don't know it. And when we do know it, the care and intentionality taken to teach it in accessible and inclusive ways is a triumph worthy of rigorous discussion and documentation for the teachers to come.