- Year 2023
- NSF Noyce Award # 1950129
- First Name Kevin
- Last Name Bonine
- Institution University of Arizona
- Role/Position PI
- Workshop Category Track 3: Master Teaching Fellowships
- Workshop Disciplines Audience STEM Education (general)
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Developing Teacher Leaders, Resources for Teachers, STEM Content Area and/or Convergent Description Skills Development, Supporting New Teachers/Induction
- Session Length 75 minutes minutes
Goals
Learn about the potential for agrivoltaics to help address global challenges around water, food, energy, land, and environmental justice. Get hands-on with an agrivoltaics demonstration unit that is readily replicated for your specific place-based-learning applications. Understand how you can use and/or modify the agrivoltaics approach for your students’ learning, including access to example lessons and curricula.
Evidence
https://schoolgardens.arizona.edu/curriculum/stem-curriculum/agrivoltaics-citizen-science; https://www.barrongafford.org/agrivoltaics.html; https://research.arizona.edu/stories/what-is-agrivoltaics
https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2022/growing-plants-power-and-partnerships.html
https://www.bisbeesciencelab.org/agrivoltiacs
Proposal
Project-based, hands-on, and minds-on, experiential learning provides a rich opportunity for teaching across the curriculum and for tapping into diverse students’ funds of knowledge. Agrivoltaics (agriculture + photovoltaics) is an approach to simultaneously tackling food, energy, water, and environmental justice challenges. In the semi-arid environment of southern Arizona, co-located food and photovoltaic energy systems can produce a unit of food with less water, protect food plants from the extremes of hot and cold throughout the year, improve the efficiency of solar panel electricity production, and provide shade for staff (and for educators and students!) working on the landscape. As a teaching tool, an agrivoltaics system is scalable and can be tailored to place-based curriculum and aligned with other developed frameworks such as the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals that provide additional access points to STEM concepts for diverse students. For our thirteen Noyce Borderlands Master Teacher Fellows (NSF Award 1950129), agrivoltaics is a flexible tool for their own teaching but is also a valuable vehicle for honing their leadership skills and providing near-peer mentorship to other teacher-colleagues in their district and across the region. Because there are so many opportunities for cultural connections around food, in addition to the inherent STEM alignment (e.g., design, engineering, assembly, biology, physiology, electricity, renewables, data collection and management, etc.), myriad other disciplines are readily integrated – as are the perspectives and lived experiences found across the spectrum of educators and students that our Fellows engage within their monthly Sin Fronteras professional development sessions.
