Teach Ag! Avengers: Heroes in Agricultural Education Recruitment

摘要

Who will carry your When we speak of public relations for our programs, whether at the post-secondary or secondary level, a primary question to ask is: Who will carry your flag? Or rather, who will be the "face" of your program when engaging potentialstakeholders? At the same time, ask most agricultural educators what they are most proud of and they will inevitable indicate their students, beaming with pride as the say the "proof is in the pudding" with our students serving as the evidence of the effectiveness of our programs! While we understand the necessity of effective public relations in order to have programmatic success, we also acknowledge that public relations are not the core mission of our programming. Our core mission is student development. An opportunity exists to accomplish our public relations needs through purposeful, systematic integration into our student development programs! At Penn State, we started a program in 2012 to help with our public relations/ recruitment needs to help address the shortage of agriscience teachers by utilizing our students and having the program purposefully assist in our teacher preparation program. As documented for decades (Camp, 2000; Camp, Broyles, & Skelton, 2002; Foster, Lawver, & Smith, 2015;Kantrovich, 2007; Kantrovich, 2010), there is a nation-wide shortage of agricultural educators entering the classroom. Out of this need came the Teach Ag! Avengers.