NAITC Curriculum Matrix

by: Debra Spielmaker

The National Agricultural Literacy Curriculum Matrix is an innovative approach to grow agricultural literacy among students in kindergarten through 12th grade.  Specifically the Matrix, part of the National Agriculture in the Classroom’s website, is an online collection of educational resources that are relevant, engaging, and designed to meet the educational requirements and agricultural literacy outcomes for formal educators.

The Matrix is essentially a three-dimensional curriculum map.  This map provides educators with resources to contextualize educational standards with meaningful experiential activities for learning.

The National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization (NAITCO) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) supported the development of the project at Utah State University. The Matrix went live August 4, 2015 and currently provides access to nearly 400 lessons and over 600 supportive companion resources meeting educational K-12 standards and agricultural literacy outcomes.

To celebrate its debut, NAITCO and my team at USU developed a YouTube video.

The Matrix also serves the needs of state Agriculture in the Classroom programs. State programs needed a resource where teachers could find quality materials that addressed educational standards – a teacher’s first priority. Many states have developed curriculum; this project allows them to share these resources supporting teachers in all states regardless of state program capacity.

As a Web 2.0 project, the Matrix is a collaborative effort where agriculture literacy professionals submit resources for inclusion in the database.  Those materials are reviewed and evaluated based on how well they connect with agricultural literacy outcomes, content standards, and Common Core standards. Teachers at all grade levels can access the Matrix materials through easy-to-use searching filters. 

For example, a search of “dairy” returns several lessons plans—in multiple grade levels—as well as companion resources such as books, activities (e.g., making butter and biotech cheese) and video links—one that features a cleverly-produced science fiction tale of an alien race finding much-needed calcium in Earthly cows. A search on “pollination” results in a lessons for upper and lower grades along with several companion resources. All companion resources in the Matrix are required to link to instruction and contextualize the content in authentic ways. Teachers can print lessons and the associated companion resources, or store a link to the lesson in MyBinder. Creating a binder on the site is easy and keeps favorite lessons in one easily accessible space. Furthermore, if the lesson is updated in the database, the resources are automatically updated in MyBinder.  

There have been so many useful resources produced.  Our job is to find quality resources that support academic requirements and increase agricultural literacy.

Debra Spielmaker is a Professor at Utah State University in the School of Applied Sciences, Technology, and Education. Dr. Spielmaker is also the Project Director of the USDA-National Agriculture in the Classroom program and the Team Leader of the National Center for Agricultural Literacy.