Horticulture crops are a multimillion dollar industry in Illinois, providing employment opportunities as well as strengthening many local economies. In February 1998, about 300 surveys were mailed to members of the Illinois Nurserymen's Association, including owners and operation managers of retail and wholesale nurseries, greenhouses and garden centers. Questions included the pool of available labor, the total number of persons employed, including full and part-time workers, starting and average salaries for employees, retention rates and training procedures. Questions were also asked regarding employees' education and experience level, average compensation for various levels of employment and demographics of the employee pool. A 48% response rate was achieved with 147 surveys returned and analyzed. Respondents reported an average of 70 employees including sales staff, office staff and seasonal employees. Those businesses responding employed an average of 2.5 managers with an approximate annual salary of $48,000, and an average of 15 laborers with an approximate annual salary of $21,000. Correlations provided insight into which areas of the industry hired persons with horticulture degrees and the types of experience most valued by the respondents.
observed the greatest increase duration was for those who had more schooling in their home country in all groups except Hispanics. Our results concur with Chiswick (1991) because no relationship between previous education level and language skill
As the need to design residential landscapes in an environmentally sensitive manner becomes more apparent, the demand for educational materials and activities that promote the habitat garden is growing. In response to this need, an educational plan, ranging from the publication of a booklet to the implementation of a demonstration garden, has been undertaken. The booklet should serve both the homeowner and the professional designer interested in wildlife-sensitive designs. Horticultural faculty and students are being organized to implement one of my designs on the Clemson Univ. campus to demonstrate the habitat garden concepts found in the booklet. Working with local homeowners by designing and having their yards certified by the National Wildlife Federation as “Backyard Wildlife Habitats” has also served to promote the habitat garden. I am also working with the Dept. of Horticulture and senior citizen volunteers to raise money to build a demonstration garden in the South Carolina State Botanical Garden. The incorporation of written materials, designs, certifications, and demonstration gardens into an educational package has resulted in a community effort to promote the habitat garden.
Technology allows educators to convey information be conveyed more flexibly and visually. How to access and make use of technological teaching tools is the challenge facing educators. HortBase provides the framework for educators to create and access educational chunks. How to make use of the information in HortBase in distance teaching is a three-step process. 1) Before assembling the teaching material, the educator must decide on who the target audience is and what information to convey. Audiences on campus have higher expectations of how they learn, as they are used to live teaching and guidance, and often do not have a clear idea of what they want to learn. Off-campus audiences have lower expectations and are more focused on the information they want. 2) The educator then decides how much of the information to bring into digital form oneself and what to draw from elsewhere. Pieces of digitized information can be created by scanning existing images into the computer or created on computer with drawing programs. Once digitized images can be manipulated to get the desired look. This is a very time-consuming step, so much effort can be saved by taking created “chunks” from HortBase. 3) Finally, what medium and tools to use must be decided. Course content can be presented with slide-show software that incorporates digitized slides, drawing, animations, video footage with text. Lectures can then be outputted to videotape or broadcast via over an analog network. Alternatively, the digitized information can be incorporated into interactive packages for CD-ROM or the World Wide Web.
The term Ethnobotany describes the study of people's relationships to plants as foods, fibers, medicines, dyes, and tools throughout the ages. Using the student active technique of experiential learning, undergraduate students enrolled in landscape design and implementation classes at Clemson University planned and installed an Ethnobotany garden in partnership with the South Carolina Botanical Garden (SCBG) staff, volunteers, and Sprouting Wings children. Sprouting Wings is an after-school gardening and nature exploration program for under-served elementary school students. College students and faculty working on this service-learning project contributed over 1,000 hours to their community while learning more about both the art and the science of landscape design and implementation. Students enrolled in the landscape Implementation class were surveyed to evaluate their perceptions on a variety of possible learning outcomes for this class. Students indicated that their service learning experience with the Ethnobotany project allowed them to acquire and practice new skills, broadened their understanding of the surrounding community, increased their ability to work in real world situations, introduced new career possibilities, gave students a better understanding of their course work, increased their ability to work on a team, increased their knowledge of environmental sustainability, and allowed them to discover or develop leadership capabilities. In a survey question regarding preference for service learning rather than traditional classes, the majority of students prefer the service learning pedagogy. In addition, most students reported a high degree of initiative for this project in their reflections.
Technology allows educators to convey information more flexibly and visually. How to access and make use of technological teaching tools is the challenge facing educators. HortBase provides the framework for educators to create and access educational chunks. How to make use of the information in HortBase in distance teaching is a three-step process. 1) Before assembling the teaching material, the educator must decide on who the target audience is and what information to convey. Audiences on campus have higher expectations of how they learn, as they are used to live teaching and guidance, and often do not have a clear idea of what they want to learn. Off-campus audiences have lower expectations and are more focused on the information they want. 2) The educator then decides how much of the information to convert into digital form individually and how much to draw from elsewhere. Pieces of digitized information can be created by scanning existing images into the computer or created on computer with authoring-illustrating programs. Once digitized, images can be manipulated to get the desired look. This is a very time-consuming step, so much effort can be saved by taking created “chunks” from HortBase. 3) Finally, what medium and tools to use must be decided. Course content can be presented with slide-show software that incorporates digitized slides, drawings, animations, and video footage with text. Lectures can then be output to videotape or broadcast over an analog rework. Alternatively, the digitized information can be incorporated into interactive packages for CD-ROM or the World Wide Web.
Horticulture students in an entry-level course (plant propagation) and an upper-level course (small fruit crop production) were assigned brief lecture-based writing tasks at the end of each class period. For the first 5 minutes of each subsequent class period, students divided into small groups to discuss their responses to the previous day s task and to generate questions related to the task topic. The class then reconvened as a whole for a question-and-answer session before the lecture was resumed. Students collected their task responses in a workbook that they turned in for experimental evaluation at the end of the quarter. When compared to previous and concurrent sections of the same courses, students engaging in the writing tasks more frequently posed questions in class, posed questions of increased complexity, and demonstrated improved ability to perform well on complex exam questions requiring integration and synthesis of information.
Abstract
Training of foreign university students is one of the more important aspects of our nation’s commitment to the betterment of life in developing countries. Because of this commitment, most horticulturists have or will have contact with students from Africa, Asia, South America or the Middle East. Not infrequently, both the student and his American advisors and instructors experience frustrations which result from the different educational experience and social attitude of the foreign student. Spending a year in Turkey has greatly increased my appreciation for the difficulties these people face when they come to the United States for advanced training.