An American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture’s STEM unit, Media Mayhem, was recently awarded the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Design Badge. The Media Mayhem unit is housed on the Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education website and is free for educators to download. The NGSS Design Badge is awarded to top-rated science units designed for the Next Generation Science Standards. 

The Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education (The Center) is an initiative of the American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture dedicated to enhancing scientific and agricultural literacy by expanding access to agriculture. The Center accomplishes this by providing immersive professional learning opportunities for educators, high-quality instructional materials designed for the Next Generation Science Standards, and collaborative partnerships between educators and agricultural experts. 

The Food and Agriculture Center for Science Education offers a range of agricultural resources that are completely free and customizable. The Center also offers multiple professional learning opportunities to support the implementation and customization of materials, enhance sustainability literacy, and/or support the modification of existing curricula to include the science of food, sustainability/resilience, and agriculture.

The Media Mayhem unit focuses on conflicting media claims telling opposing views, which can be difficult for students to understand. In this high school 5E unit on the dairy food system and sustainability, students explore media claims about the impacts of the dairy sector on the environment to figure out which ones most accurately represent the body of science on the dairy sector’s impacts. Across a series of four modules, students figure out how the components of the dairy food system impact the environment, including pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, climate, and biodiversity. To conclude the unit, students use engineering design processes to evaluate multiple solutions to reduce the dairy sector’s environmental impact.