An emotional rollercoaster: The emotional and pedagogical impact of cultural experiences on agricultural education undergraduate students.

As classrooms become more diverse, having multicultural intelligence, or the ability to relate to diverse student populations, is imperative to be an effective classroom teacher (Conner & Roberts, 2013). To build cultural intelligence in a stand-alone course, examining self-perception and cultural engagement, as well as studying one’s own history and interaction with others of diverse backgrounds is essential (Brown, 2004; Hains et al., 2013; Vincent et al., 2014). This idea was the focus of the cultural experiences presented to pre-service teachers in a collegiate agricultural education course at a southern land grant university. Cultural experiences were used to introduce students to cultural diversity in a required agricultural education course for undergraduates. Students self-selected an experience outside of their cultural norm to observe, participate in, or volunteer for. Students then reflected on the experience and included their emotional response toward the stimulus as well as the implications of the experience upon pedagogy application. Reflections were coded and themes towards type of experiences emerged and included religious events, race/ethnicity events, public-service events, and socio-cultural events. From the total population (N=22) four student experiences were selected within each category and analyzed according to the components the Model of Cultural Experience and Evoked Emotion. Results concluded that students experienced fear as a primary emotion before and during the experience while having emotions of joy, surprise, fear, and sadness during the experience. Upon reflection, students also indicated positive implications of the experience upon their pedagogy as future agricultural educators.