Immigration and Agriculture
Ashley Sprengeler is an undergraduate student majoring in dairy science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ashley worked with middle school teacher, James Bitner, to develop curriculum materials for his classroom that were related to the international agriculture issues that she learned about in the Mexico seminar and field course.
Body:
Ashley developed and shared these presentations with the seventh grade class at Whitehorse Middle School:
- This presentation is about dairy farms: the cows, buildings, life of a dairy farmer, dairying in Wisconsin and an introduction to the relationship between agriculture and immigration.
- This is a quiz that teaches facts about immigration to the United States.
After the presentations, Ashley and the teachers worked with the class on a related role playing exercise related to immigration issues in the U.S. Students read a scenario, split up into two groups and prepared discussion points for debating this immigration issue. A few weeks later, Ashley took the students to visit a dairy farm.Most of the students had never visited a dairy farm and had never been up close to a cow.The students saw cows of all ages, were shown how they are cared for, what they eat and where they are milked.