The lead author, Quintana M. Clark of Oregon State University’s Department of Educational Practice and Research and Department of Agricultural Education, Communication, and Sciences, worked with Olivia Perez and Jennifer L. Freeman to synthesize scholarship spanning Indigenous epistemologies, land-based pedagogy, culturally grounded STEM education, and community-centered economic development. Their article, published in the journal Frontiers in Education on 16 October 2026, does not report a classroom trial or measure learning outcomes. Instead, it articulates a design artifact: a coherent pedagogical structure intended to guide future curriculum development, implementation, and empirical research in Tribal Colleges and Universities and community-based educational settings.

The intellectual foundation of the framework is the principle that knowledge in Indigenous epistemologies is relational, place-based, and sustained through relationships among people, land, and community knowledge systems. Learning, in this view, is not the acquisition of discrete information but participation in relational networks connecting learners to ancestors, language, community, and territory. Storytelling, dialogue, observation, and intergenerational knowledge exchange function as central pedagogical practices. Language carries particular weight because Indigenous languages encode ecological knowledge and cultural teachings that shape how relationships among humans, land, and non-human life are understood. The authors draw on the words of Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear, who describes existence as a web of relationships in which what is done to the land, to the animals, and to the water is done to oneself.

From this foundation, the framework extends into land-based pedagogy, a tradition in which land is not merely a setting for instruction but a living system that sustains ecological knowledge, cultural values, and spiritual relationships. Learning occurs through observation, participation, and reciprocal relationships with local environments and community knowledge holders. This orientation challenges educational models that separate knowledge from place or treat environmental systems as objects of extraction. The authors also invoke Two-Eyed Seeing, an integrative perspective articulated by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall, which brings Indigenous knowledge systems and Western scientific traditions into relationship without privileging one over the other. Within the framework, students can engage soil science, engineering design, and data analysis while remaining grounded in Indigenous worldviews.

Hemp serves as the applied and relational learning context that ties these threads together. The crop has re-emerged as culturally, environmentally, and economically significant for many Indigenous communities, intersecting with regenerative agriculture, sustainable construction materials, community health, and economic sovereignty. Hemp education sits at the intersection of agricultural sciences, sustainability, and STEM learning, making it a powerful vehicle for interdisciplinary curriculum. The authors illustrate the framework with a hempcrete material science module: students examine locally sourced hemp as a sustainable building material, explore Indigenous perspectives on shelter and natural building materials, consult community members and Elders about local housing needs, mix and test hempcrete samples, evaluate material properties, and investigate hemp-based housing as a pathway for workforce development and community economic resilience.

The framework’s structure is represented through a flower metaphor developed by the research team. At the center lie four foundational dimensions of curriculum design: Land, Culture, Voice, and Economics. Surrounding petals represent pedagogical approaches, including holistic, experiential, place-based, community-based, and intergenerational learning. The leaves represent guiding Indigenous values of reciprocity, respect, relationality, and responsibility. The stem symbolizes student-centered pathways that connect learners’ identities, motivations, and interests to culturally grounded educational experiences. Together, these elements support community wellbeing and sustainable futures through culturally grounded STEM education, with each component reinforcing the others rather than operating in isolation.

Each dimension carries specific pedagogical weight. Land-based learning positions land as teacher and fosters understanding of interdependence among people, environment, and community wellbeing. Culture reflects the role of Tribal knowledge systems, ancestors, protocols, language, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in shaping how learning is framed, supporting identity development and community belonging. Voice positions student and community participation as expressions of sovereignty and self-determination, encouraging learners to engage in dialogue, decision-making, and culturally grounded knowledge production. Economics, a dimension the authors emphasize as a distinctive contribution, connects STEM and agricultural education to intertribal economic futures, workforce pathways, and sovereignty-centered development, extending economic learning beyond labor preparation toward self-determination, land stewardship, and community resurgence.

The methodological approach reflects the framework’s values. The study employed a qualitative, design-oriented conceptual inquiry guided by Two-Eyed Seeing, with Indigenous methodologies providing the epistemological and ethical grounding and Western qualitative traditions supplying analytic structure and transparency. The research team, comprising a lead researcher and two Native American student research assistants, developed the framework through weekly collaborative discussions over more than ten weeks, working with iterative curriculum framework diagrams, thematic cluster maps, reflective design notes, and evolving visual representations. Reflexivity was sustained through ongoing dialogue, documentation of design decisions, and continual alignment with Indigenous values. The authors acknowledge positionality as central to relational knowledge creation, and they frame the resulting model as a living conceptual artifact open to refinement through community dialogue and future empirical research.

The authors are explicit about limitations. The framework is a conceptual model developed through iterative synthesis rather than empirical implementation, so future research must examine its effectiveness across diverse educational contexts. While it draws on intertribal perspectives and Indigenous scholarship, it does not claim to represent all Indigenous communities or knowledge systems, and it is intended to be adapted in collaboration with local communities, educators, and learners. The authors also note that hemp-based educational initiatives may require attention to local regulatory environments, Tribal sovereignty, and seed sovereignty considerations that vary across communities and jurisdictions, and that educators should work collaboratively with Tribal governments and community leaders to ensure curriculum development aligns with local priorities, cultural protocols, and applicable legal requirements.

What makes the framework notable beyond its specific application is its insistence that scientific competencies and relational land stewardship can be developed as complementary rather than competing educational outcomes. By integrating Indigenous epistemologies with Western agronomic science, engineering applications, and sustainability-oriented economic practices, the model moves beyond superficial inclusion of cultural content, engaging students in authentic application of agronomic, engineering, and ecological knowledge within community-centered contexts. Learners collect and interpret data, evaluate design alternatives, investigate environmental impacts, and apply scientific reasoning to real-world challenges while remaining grounded in values of stewardship and relational responsibility. Planned future work includes developing full curricular modules, instructor guides, digital learning resources, and pilot implementations within Tribal Colleges and Universities and community-based educational settings, with subsequent studies examining learner experiences, pedagogical adaptations, and culturally grounded approaches to assessment. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, and it positions hemp education not merely as a technical subject but as a relational learning space through which students engage land stewardship, community knowledge systems, and applied scientific inquiry in pursuit of sustainable, sovereignty-centered futures.

Subject of Research: An Indigenous land-based curriculum framework integrating land, culture, voice, and economics into STEM and agricultural education through hemp education

Article Title: Land, culture, voice, and economics: an Indigenous land based framework for STEM and agricultural education

Article References: Clark, Q. M., Perez, O., & Freeman, J. L. (2026). Land, culture, voice, and economics: an Indigenous land based framework for STEM and agricultural education. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1877168. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1877168

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1877168

Keywords: Indigenous education, STEM education, hemp education, land-based pedagogy, Two-Eyed Seeing, agricultural education, curriculum framework, economic sovereignty, bio-based economy, Tribal Colleges and Universities, culturally grounded pedagogy, sustainability education

The research team applied the Theory of Planned Behavior, a widely used psychological framework that explains intentions through three forces: attitude, the personal evaluation of a behavior; subjective norms, the perceived approval of family, peers, and society; and perceived behavioral control, the sense of having the resources and ability to act. They added a fourth construct, self-efficacy, borrowed from Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory. What makes the study unusual is that instead of treating agricultural career intention as a single yes-or-no outcome, the researchers split it into five distinct destinations—government jobs, researcher or professor positions, farming, agripreneurship, and civil services—and modeled the odds of each against government employment using multinomial logistic regression in STATA 17.

The sample was drawn purposively from Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University in Uttar Pradesh and VIT University in Tamil Nadu, institutions chosen because they sit in semi-urban regions where traditional and modern agriculture coexist and because they represent northern and southern India’s different agro-climatic and cultural zones. Respondents answered a structured questionnaire distributed through Google Forms. The team pre-tested the instrument, confirmed internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha values all above the 0.70 threshold—attitude scored 0.960 and self-efficacy 0.962—and validated the constructs through expert review and factor analysis. A post-hoc power analysis in G*Power 3.1 returned a value of 0.999, far above the conventional 0.80 benchmark, indicating the study had excellent statistical sensitivity despite its modest sample.

The descriptive statistics alone tell a striking story. More than 80 percent of the students came from farming families, and 198 of the 285 were from rural areas, meaning most respondents had grown up with agriculture literally at their doorstep. Biology was the dominant academic background at the higher secondary level, with 169 students, and most had studied in English medium. Yet even among this cohort—arguably the most agriculture-embedded group of young people in the country—the gravitational pull of secure public employment dominated every demographic slice. Government jobs were the top choice for both men and women, across both universities, and regardless of whether students came from farming households.

The regression results revealed which psychological levers actually move career intentions. Attitude toward agriculture emerged as a strong, significant predictor of choosing a research or academic career over a government job, with a coefficient of 1.25 (p = 0.005). Subjective norms were similarly powerful (1.04, p = 0.009), suggesting that encouragement and perceived prestige from teachers, family, and peers are critical for steering students toward laboratories and lecture halls. This aligns closely with what the Theory of Planned Behavior predicts: positive personal evaluations and social validation strengthen intention, particularly for long-horizon paths like research that demand sustained commitment.

But the study also uncovered a genuine paradox. Self-efficacy—the confidence students have in their own abilities—was a significant negative predictor of research careers (-0.93, p = 0.032) and a marginal negative predictor for both civil services and agripreneurship. In other words, the most self-assured students were the ones least likely to pick these paths relative to government employment. The authors interpret this counterintuitively: highly confident students may prefer careers with clear recruitment mechanisms, faster returns, and greater certainty, viewing research and entrepreneurship as prolonged, uncertain gambles. Self-efficacy, it turns out, does not uniformly push people toward ambitious options; it interacts with how students weigh risk against reward.

Language proficiency produced one of the study’s most practical findings. Students with stronger language skills were significantly more likely to choose agripreneurship over government jobs (1.29, p = 0.039) and showed a marginal positive tendency toward farming (0.93, p = 0.057). Communication ability, the researchers argue, functions as a form of human capital in modern agriculture, easing networking, marketing, input negotiation, and engagement with digital and global agri-networks. Meanwhile, the constants for farming (-4.48, p = 0.001) and agripreneurship (-4.59, p = 0.006) were strongly negative, indicating that structural deterrents—income instability, physical labor intensity, financial risk, limited access to capital, and lower social prestige—overwhelm individual attributes. Even students inclined toward these paths are being held back by forces no single personality trait can overcome.

Demographics mattered too, though in patterned ways. Female students leaned toward research and civil services, while male students showed a marginal preference for farming, echoing persistent gender norms and traditional roles around land ownership and family expectations. Institutional affiliation shaped preferences as well: students at DDU Gorakhpur University, a public university with many rural students, showed stronger interest in government jobs, farming, and civil services, whereas VIT students, embedded in a more urban, tech-oriented environment, were comparatively less drawn to these options. The authors caution, however, that university affiliation lost statistical significance once psychological factors were accounted for, suggesting the institutional effect operates largely through the attitudes and norms students bring with them.

Perhaps the most theoretically interesting contradiction is that attitudes and subjective norms, which so strongly reinforced government job preferences, did not extend to agripreneurship despite years of policy advocacy for agri-startups under initiatives like RKVY-RAFTAAR and the National Education Policy 2020. Social approval, the study suggests, is context-dependent: government employment is perceived as secure and socially endorsed, while entrepreneurship is still coded as risky and uncertain. The gap between policy push and student perception persists because mentorship, market access, and risk-sharing mechanisms remain insufficient to shift the underlying norms.

The authors close with concrete recommendations: targeted career awareness programs exposing students to the full spectrum of agricultural opportunities, curriculum reforms that showcase real-world success stories and hands-on training in tech-driven ventures, and structured land-leasing schemes that give landless but educated young people temporary, renewable access to cultivable land, supported by input subsidies and digital tools. The broader message is that India’s agricultural future will not be secured by exhortation alone. If the sector wants its best and brightest, it must change what a career in agriculture is perceived to be—not a fallback of last resort, but a path with genuine security, prestige, and reward.

Subject of Research: Psychological and socio-demographic drivers of agricultural career intentions among Indian university students using the Theory of Planned Behavior

Article Title: Cultivating agricultural career intentions through behavioral drivers among students

Article References: Chaurasiya, C., Priya, A. P., Mansingh, J. P., Ihou, A. F. Y., & Mathew, M. (2026). Cultivating agricultural career intentions through behavioral drivers among students. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1168. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02286-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02286-z

Keywords: agricultural careers, Theory of Planned Behavior, career intentions, agripreneurship, government jobs, self-efficacy, subjective norms, India, agricultural education, multinomial logistic regression, youth in agriculture, career counseling

Smith’s central claim is that the NFA has too often been treated as a footnote to a better-known story. The organization was, in effect, a Black counterpoint to the Future Farmers of America at a time when FFA chapters throughout the South were segregated. Because of that structural relationship, historians have tended to view the NFA only through its connection to the FFA, casting it in a supporting role rather than as a movement with its own origins, logic, and achievements. Smith contends that this framing distorts the historical record. The history of Black farming in America has been told predominantly as a narrative of oppression, a story of slavery, sharecropping, and dispossession. As Smith writes in the book, decades of scholarship on Black people’s historical relationship to agriculture have predominantly framed agriculture as a domain of exploitation, subjugation, and racial exclusion. Those framings are accurate as far as they go, but they are incomplete.

What the NFA story adds, according to Smith, is a dimension of empowerment and agency. The organization mobilized Black youth to consider careers in agriculture at a moment when such careers were rarely presented as aspirational for Black children. It built relationships and social networks through which entire communities celebrated farming rather than associating it only with hardship. I want people to know it existed, Smith said, noting how powerful it was that these Black boys and their adult mentors were trying to change the face of agriculture and were doing it very well. The point is not to minimize the barriers that Black farmers faced, which were severe and well documented, but to insist that Black rural communities were also sites of ambition, expertise, and institution-building.

Although the NFA became a national organization in 1935, Smith traces its roots back roughly half a century earlier, to what he calls the Black Youth Farm Movement. This movement encompassed the establishment of the 1890 land-grant Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the South, the Negro 4-H, and eventually the NFA itself. Together, these institutions embedded farming in Black education and community life in a systematic way. The 1890 land-grant universities, created as the Black counterparts to the white land-grant institutions funded under the Morrill Act, provided higher education in agriculture and the mechanical arts at a time when Southern Black students were barred from most white institutions. The Negro 4-H extended agricultural learning to younger children, and the NFA carried that work into high schools, creating a pipeline that connected classroom instruction, extracurricular activity, and eventual careers in farming and related fields.

The NFA was not simply a school club; it was woven into the fabric of rural communities. Chapters organized events that brought whole towns together to celebrate the accomplishments of participating boys. Livestock shows displayed the animals that members had raised and groomed, while father-son banquets featured menus drawn from food the boys had produced themselves, turning agricultural education into a shared family and community experience. Members competed in local, regional, state, and national competitions, giving rural Black youth arenas in which their skills could be formally recognized. Black farmers also benefited directly, learning the latest farming methods through collaborations between NFA chapters and the 1890 land-grant HBCUs. In this way, the organization functioned as a conduit for agricultural science, moving new techniques from research institutions into the fields of small Black-owned farms across the South.

Smith’s book documents the reach of the organization through vivid episodes. At a national NFA convention in New Jersey, members participated in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, presenting exhibits, performing with the NFA band, and taking part in a radio show, all while learning about agriculture on a global scale. For young men from isolated rural communities, the fair represented an encounter with international ideas about food and farming, delivered on one of the largest public stages of the era. Smith also recounts the history of an NFA summer camp in North Carolina, later named in honor of Sidney B. Simmons, a University of Illinois alumnus and national NFA leader. The camp combined recreation with leadership development, using outdoor activities to strengthen the social skills and confidence of the campers. These programs show that the NFA understood something that modern youth development research has repeatedly confirmed: leadership grows through practice, mentorship, and community recognition, not through instruction alone.

The classroom dimension of the story is equally important. Smith examines agricultural education at the high school level through the eyes of Lorenza Crosby, an agriculture teacher, and the NFA chapter at Randolph High School in La Grange, Texas. Black agriculture teachers, Smith argues, built a class of world leaders by teaching boys that they could use what they learned about farming to shape their communities and the nation. That conviction, he writes, was the essence of the land-grant mission: knowledge generated and transmitted through public institutions should return public benefit. In segregated Texas, a well-taught agriculture classroom became a site of civic formation as much as vocational training, and teachers like Crosby acted as both instructors and community leaders.

The end of the NFA came in 1965, when the organization was absorbed by the FFA, and Smith’s account of that merger is pointed. Black agricultural leaders had long been asking for representation within the agriculture education branch of the U.S. Department of Education. Instead of gaining a seat at the table on equal terms, they saw the federal agency’s powerful leadership use the antidiscrimination language of the Civil Rights Act to force a merger that Smith describes as really a hostile takeover. Desegregation, in this instance, did not preserve the institutions that Black communities had built; it dissolved them. The consequences were measurable. The number of Black boys participating in the FFA after the merger was dramatically lower than the number who had been part of the NFA, a decline that suggests how much organizational infrastructure, mentorship, and community support was lost when the NFA disappeared as an independent body.

Yet the story did not end in 1965. In 1994, Corey Flournoy, another University of Illinois alumnus, became the first Black president of the national FFA organization, and Smith sees that milestone as part of the continuing NFA story, a delayed fruit of the pathways the earlier organization had opened. Today, the challenges Smith documents remain stark: a steady decline in the number of Black farmers, driven partly by lack of access to credit, underfunding of agriculture programs at HBCUs, the stigmas attached to Black participation in agriculture, and a lack of Black representation in academic programs. At the same time, he observes a burgeoning interest among young Black people in resurrecting their historical relationship to agriculture through urban farming programs, food justice initiatives, and organizations such as Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. Smith argues that the NFA should serve as a national historical model for maintaining the interest of Black youth in agriculture and exposing them to career opportunities. As he writes, the NFA offered Black farm boys a clear pathway to use agriculture as a site for Black self-determination, community uplift, economic vitality, educational achievement, and career training, and its untold story illuminates a pathway to understand the future of Black people’s connection to agriculture, creating what he calls a Black agricultural blueprint for the nation and the world.

Subject of Research: The history and legacy of the New Farmers of America and Black youth agricultural education

Article Title: Book tells the untold story of how New Farmers of America transformed rural Black life

Article References: Book tells the untold story of how New Farmers of America transformed rural Black life. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: New Farmers of America, Black farming, agricultural education, Future Farmers of America, 1890 land-grant HBCUs, rural Black communities, Bobby J. Smith II, Black Youth Farm Movement, Negro 4-H, Civil Rights Act merger, food justice, Black agricultural legacy