College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Food Packaging Borrows Space-Age Technology
Learning Something from Nothing
Researcher Develops New Process to Reduce Cost of Ethanol Production
Mentoring Academic Growth in the Community
Mapping Concepts from the Classroom to the Computer
Virginia Tech Assists with Food Safety and Security Efforts
Students Share Nutrition Information
Virginia Tech Expands Aquaculture Research Efforts
Nuts and Seeds May Help Lower Cholesterol
¿Horticultura?
How the marriage of diversity education and the green industry produced anything but the odd couple
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| Students visit the university greenhouse to get hands-on language training. |
Barbara Kraft, a Spanish instructor, had no idea what to expect when Virginia Tech’s Department of Horticulture contacted her. Now, five years later, Kraft has developed a curriculum unlike any other in the nation. In it she combines horticulture with an innovative lesson plan on language, culture, and politics.
Industry officials requested the course, Spanish for the Green Industry, after they noticed recent horticulture graduates were unprepared to work side-by-side with a predominantly Spanish-speaking workforce. Over the years, the course has evolved from a one-credit elective to a three-credit requirement for all horticulture undergraduates.
“As far as I know, the class is the first of its kind in the country,” Kraft says.
College administrators in Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have contacted Kraft about using Spanish for the Green Industry as a template for similar classes at their schools. Because foreign language departments already exist in most large universities, many of these schools have instructors qualified to teach the course’s backbone: the Spanish language.
“This is a very targeted language class,” Kraft says. “We
learn basic grammar, but most of the class is conversationbased
with the vocabulary targeted specifically for the green
industry.”
She teaches in a classroom adjacent to Virginia Tech’s greenhouses, occasionally bringing shovels, wheelbarrows, and gardening tools to her lectures so that students can visualize words as they learn them. Even though each of the three class sections —which Kraft caps at 16 students to allow for more student-teacher interaction and smaller discussions—are identical in content though individual students have different levels of familiarity with Spanish.
“I have students from zero language experience to fluency,” says Kraft, who not only speaks fluent Spanish but also has lived in Mexico and Venezuela.
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