Elizabeth Badertscher's classroom is located just off the cafeteria inside Sabetha Middle School. The bright yellow walls hint at the enthusiasm you can feel walking through the door — the urge to stick a few Legos together or try out a robot is hard to resist, even for an adult.

Her students will tell you that the room isn’t just a classroom, it’s a hub of innovation and hands-on learning. It’s a place where imagination and education intersect, and as the students file in, the questions and conversation for the period’s lesson erupt.

AGRICULTURE IN STEM: Elizabeth Badertscher helps a student with a project in one of her classes. Badertscher uses free resources from Kansas Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom to bring agricultural concepts to the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) classes she teaches at Sabetha Middle School, Sabetha, Kan.

“Mrs. Badertscher, can you help me with my rover?” a student asks before the tardy bell has even sounded. It’s easy to feel that the classroom isn’t typical — it’s a STEM laboratory where the science of agriculture comes to life through cutting-edge simulations, robotics and real-world application.

Bringing agriculture to STEM

Badertscher has been a teacher at Sabetha Middle School, Sabetha, Kan., for the past eight years, even completing her student teaching within the district. It’s home.

“I actually went to college to teach math and taught at the high school until two years ago, when the district decided to transition away from a FACS (family and consumer science) class at the middle school to a STEM and computer science class,” she says, explaining the process of building the program from the ground up. “I taught math at the high school halftime and then would come to the middle school in the afternoons to teach STEM. We didn’t have a curriculum, so I researched a lot of topics that were important to our community, including wind turbine farms and agriculture. The district liked what I did and for the ’23-’24 school year, I was offered the full-time STEM and computer science position. And I still get to write my own curriculum.”

AGRICULTURE TIES: Elizabeth Badertscher’s students come away from her classes understanding that agriculture has ties to many career paths, including the typical STEM careers.

Badertscher credits the school district with the freedom she’s been given to build programming that piques the interest of her students and pays homage to the region. The emphasis was and is focused on meeting and connecting to state standards, not on how she accomplishes the goal. Her research led her to both the Kansas Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom (KFAC) and Journey 2050, programs that create hands-on connection to agriculture and the multifaceted nature of farming. The free curriculums were a perfect complement to one another and positioned Badertscher’s students to have real-world conversations about relevant and critical issues in their area. A win-win.

“We’ve done drone activities in a high-tech farming lesson plan and simulated checking out pastures of sheep with a drone to get a head count and find problem areas. The kids loved it, and there are career components that we use,” she explains. “It’s surprising to think that we are in a farming community, and many of our kids know nothing about agriculture.”

At first students were reluctant, questioning why they needed to learn about agriculture — after all, “Agriculture only applies if you live on a farm,” many rationalized. The class sentiment quickly changed.

“You can see lightbulbs come on when kids connect careers to agriculture. Once they understand that we are all connected to agriculture — grocery store workers, bankers, their parents, as consumers — then their attitude changes. The unit on ag careers ties everything together,” she says.

KFAC Teacher of the Year

Badertscher’s dedication to agriculture stems from her own deep roots in farming. Watching her parents’ efforts at their Valley View Milling business in Bern, Kan., as well as the work that her dad and uncles invested in their farming operation, instilled a love of the land and what it provides.

Today, Badertscher, her husband and four daughters, can be found working on their own diversified farming operation that consists of row crops and cattle.

Her dedication and work to bring agriculture education to her students earned Badertscher recognition as the 2024 KFAC Teacher of the Year, an honor that included an all-expense paid trip for Badertscher and her husband to this year’s National Agriculture in the Classroom conference in Salt Lake City.

HANDS-ON TEACHING, LEARNING: Mixing innovation, hands-on learning, and agricultural concepts through lessons offered by Kansas Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom, Elizabeth Badertscher has sparked students to follow agricultural career paths into high school and the Sabetha FFA Chapter.

“The conference was amazing. It was incredibly eye-opening to see how agriculture touches every state — even in the cities, people are talking about ag,” Badertscher says. “The amount of work that every state agriculture in the classroom program does has a lot to do with that conversation and helping to put agriculture in classrooms across the country. The free resources and curriculum that meets state standards helps teachers incorporate agriculture.”

The robotics workshops, however, were the boon of the National Ag in the Classroom experience for the STEM-loving educator, who shares that she is excited to incorporate what she’s learned in her classroom for the 2024-25 school year.

To learn more about Kansas Foundation for Ag in Classroom, visit ksagclassroom.org.

From STEM to FFA

Sabetha Middle School students getting a taste of real-world agriculture and how it can apply to their own future, in Elizabeth Badertscher's classes. And they are also learning a bit more about the opportunities available in high school: FFA.

Concerted efforts between Badertscher and the Sabetha High School agriculture education teacher and FFA advisor, Chris Bauerle, is creating an “FFA funnel” of students who are interested in taking agriculture classes and joining the FFA once in high school.

“We had a lot of kids asking about FFA and wanting to go to the high school to see what the program was all about. We (Bauerle and Badertscher) organized a field trip that allowed the students to walk through the greenhouse, talk about the Intro to Ag classes and FFA opportunities available. It really opened their minds and helped show what’s available in the district beyond our middle school STEM programming,” Badertscher says.

Handke writes from Easton, Kan.