Reflecting on the Past While Looking to the Future

Reflections on the Past: Growing up on a small dryland farm in northeastern Colorado was idyllic. I loved everything connected with that experience and when I was nine years old, I joined a 4-H club that further cemented my love for the farm and the life style that came with it. By the time I started high school, I already knew that I wanted to spend my life somewhere in the agricultural industry and enrolling in the vocational agriculture program was a "given." Fortunately, the teacher in the program was terrific and he helped me find my way. He encouraged the development of my supervised farming program and involvement in the FFA. What a great experience that was!Initially, I wasn't sure about my major as an undergraduate but soon realized that teaching vocational agriculture would be a good career fi t for me. After graduation from Colorado State University, I taught vocational agriculture for six years and loved every minute of that time in my life. With the encouragement of a mentor, I went back to College where I earned the doctorate in Agricultural Education from The Ohio State University and became a faculty member there. After 13 years at Ohio State, I transitioned to live in Arizona and spent 8 years working as an educational consultant. Then I returned to be a teacher educator in Agricultural Education at the University of Arizona where I retired after 18 years on July 1, 2014.During the years of my experience with agricultural education, I have watched it evolve into the program that exists today. It has been interesting to watch the name change with the times. Going from vocational agriculture to agricultural education with a number of different areas of focus over the years all occurred while I was in the profession and not without some controversy along the way.I was present at the National FFA Convention as a voting delegate for Colorado when the NFA was merged into the FFA. Then as a young vocational agriculture teacher when girls were officially admitted into the organization, I actively sought boys AND girls for my high school program. As I re fl ect back on those changes, I have come to believe that the agricultural education program as we know it today would not have occurred without those changes. The program was no longer just for rural white boys but became available to both boys and girls in all kinds of settings.By the time I was a young faculty member at Ohio State, the "overhaul" of the technical side of agricultural education programs had begun and was in full force primarily as a result of the vocational education acts that were enacted at the federal level. This led to some major expansion of the definition of agriculture to include technical areas beyond farming and ranching. As a result, many specialized programs were created across the country. We also began to value the notion that the program was a "science" based program because of the nature of the technologies in the agricultural industry.During that same time, the notion of "vocational," which tended to have a negative stigma attached, pushed the name changes that followed. As each of those changes came to the profession of agricultural education, there was more than a little debate about them. In fact, it seems to me that many of those issues still find their way into the discussions that occur today.In retrospect, it seems to me that sometimes the agricultural education profession was too slow to make some of the changes that needed to occur to keep the instructional programs relevant. At the same time, I believe that the profession was also too quick to adopt some of the changes because they saw a financial boost for those instructional programs. As a member of the profession for over 45 years, I'm sure that I have been complicit in both cases.Current Observations:One area of the program that has been of concern to me is what I would call "the boy crisis." I was active as a high school teacher and later as a teacher educator in seeking ways to open the doors for girls to enter the program. …