BERNE — Two new courses to be offered at Berne-Knox-Westerlo  this year are future-oriented but earth-bound. Theoretical but practical. Internet-assisted but hands-on.

District administrators and teachers are hoping that  the two courses — Introduction to Agricultural Science, and Animal Science and Biology — will yield a nice crop of desirable goals. And will eventually lead to the development of a complete agricultural-science course sequence that will earn state certification. A few days before the year year began, about 20 kids had enrolled in each of the two courses.

The courses and the developing program are not vocational. They’re not all about how to be a farmer. They’re about the state’s biggest producer of wealth and jobs, BKW Business Manager Sara Blood points out, if you factor in the food industry, the timber industry, and other related activities.

Whole brain learning

‘The more we know about how the brain works,”  says Superintendent Timothy Mundell, “we know that kids don’t process information in compartments. They need context.”

Neil McConnelee, science department head and physics teacher, wants to teach about pH (acidity) levels and their effects on plant growth, in context, in his Intro to Agricultural Science course.  The Animal Science course will be taught by Stephanie Moshier.  

McConnlee’s  plan calls for doing some comparative farming in the classroom by measuring pH levels of various soils with a probe that’s  able to upload the pH data to laptops and tablets, and then have the students observe growth rates and draw their own conclusions.

Mundell says the district hopes to someday revive  something the school  had long ago: a school garden where demonstrations and learning would always be at-hand.

In the meantime, two government grants are helping with the expenses of the new courses, like transporting students — including elementary school children — to area farms where classroom learning will be illustrated; where the birth of a calf, for example, might be seen, not imagined.

BKW is the first district in Albany County to begin developing an ag science program. Neighboring Schoharie County, says Blood, has an established program of the kind. She says that the presence of the State University of New York College of Technology and Agriculture at Cobleskill was a big help in getting Schoharie’s program underway.

The SUNY college is in BKW’s plans, and on its wish list, too. Dr. Andrew Gashcho Landis, a professor of environmental science at the college, will be a visiting lecturer in McConnelee’s class.

Mundell says of SUNY Cobleskill, “We’ll grow that relationship over time.”

One  way to look at the new courses is as interdisciplinary ways  to engage the whole brain. And the whole student population. Another is a way to give kids ”a lot of jumping off points for careers.” And yet another is an approach to the modern workplace, says Mundell, “to the collaboration and teamwork that needs to happen...that takes many kinds of minds and skill sets.”

Building on the familiar

McConnelee envisions how that collaboration might play out in his class.

He acknowledges that few BKW students now come from working farms and farm families.  Though rural, the towns the school district serves are not intensely cultivated. The main product of their fields is hay. “Premium hay” says Blood. “Belmont uses only Hilltown hay in its stables.”

Yet McConnelee and Blood agree that most  BKW students grow up knowing more about trees, animals, and nature than their urban or suburban counterparts.

“These courses will start with what they know, with what they are already familiar with,” says McConnelee.  To the extent the courses will be based on life experiences,  they will, in theory, be that  much more relatable and involving.

Learning together

Mundell, too, sees the courses as an opportunity for students to “bring their life experiences into the classroom...to say ‘Hey! I know something about this.’”

McConnelee sees a great doorway to collaborative learning among the students.

“My class will have some of the school’s best physics students, along with students who are lower achieving.”  But he sees each group helping the other to learn, each contributing its different kinds of knowledge: the high-achievers with the scientific theory or mathematics  they have mastered, and the others with their more can-do, have-done-it knowledge. Together, he believes, they will learn better.

Blood, who herself comes from a farming background, recalls being “totally amazed by how a kid who was a low-performer academically could take apart a tractor engine and put it back together in no time.”

“We’re a small district, “ Mundell says. “Our students have all grown up together. I think they already recognize each other’s strengths.”  In these courses, he believes, they can use their strengths to help each other.

“We’ve made students a number,” he says of modern education, “ranked and sorted them.”  Collaboration is the way of the modern workplace and schools ought to promote it, he believes.

Mundell  says “the hook is science” and  agricultural science can be a way to excite and interest the science-averse.

He also  sees the agricultural-science  initiative and its interdisciplinary approach as a way to  “meet kids where they are.” He welcomes the state’s four-year moratorium on evaluating teachers based on students’ standardized test scores  as a period during which schools can innovate.

The district’s teacher of elementary Earth science, Carey Raymond, sees the youngest  students in the BKW system getting a foretaste of ag science well before they enter secondary school.  A curriculum continuum will begin in the earliest grades.

Further down the road, the district sees graduates with new paths to follow..  

The American Farm Bureau Federation says about 15 percent of the United States workforce is employed in agriculture-related fields. The U.S. Department  of Agriculture expected more than 54,000 jobs for college graduates to be created  in the agricultural, food, and renewable natural resources sectors annually from 2010 to 2015.

BKW sees career opportunities for its graduates ranging from entrepreneurial small-scale farming — perhaps right in the Hilltowns — to careers in agronomics, food marketing and distribution, government policy, microbiology and  information technology, among others.

“We’re putting our toe in the water on this,” Mundell says. ‘But, as one of my fellow administrators likes to say, we have to help our kids to aspire, to see what’s out there, the future.”