Use of Simulated Discussion Prompts to Assess Sentiment Toward Agriculture in Higher Education Instructors

Higher education instructors may include interdisciplinary subjects in the classroom to encourage diverse yet balanced learning. Agriculture is a challenging subject of study that includes elements of art, engineering, and science. Although it is important to know if teachers in higher education incorporate agriculture in their lectures, it is more useful to comprehend the attitudes or opinions that are expressed. The purpose of this study was to determine whether higher education instructors mention agriculture in simulated discussion prompt generation and, if so, indicate the responses of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment towards agriculture. An electronic survey asked teaching faculty from multiple land-grant institutions to respond to a randomized prompt related to their declared area of interest. Qualitative methodologies included open response coding, and reliable and validated thematic coding served as the primary analysis. The study reports that 25 of the 59 responses included comments about agriculture and 72.0% of the responses were neutral. The rest painted agriculture in positive (8.0%) or negative (20.0%) interpretations. The results of the study reveal the challenges that teachers face in making interdisciplinary leaps, including agriculture in the classroom, without risking the spread of inaccurate information. Additional research should be conducted to understand the impacts of loaded language on students’ perceptions of agriculture using the results produced by the current study.