What is Agricultural and Horticultural Science about?
Subject-specific terms can be found in the glossary.
Learning in Agricultural and Horticultural Science develops students' understanding of the interconnectedness of people, soils, plants, and animals. It covers the ways in which agricultural and horticultural practices impact on the environment, and how good practices sustain or enhance the environment.
Agricultural and Horticultural Science is about all the on-site decisions as well as the off-site influences and considerations that go into producing primary products. While this expertise has ancient roots, present-day challenges and opportunities make Agricultural and Horticultural Science one of the most relevant and exciting areas of study.
Hands-on practical work, and immersive learning in Agricultural and Horticultural Science are valuable learning experiences that help establish students' knowledge of he mātāpono and appreciation of Papatūānuku. There is a strong emphasis on economic, social, environmental, and cultural sustainability in Agricultural and Horticultural Science. The need for, and importance of, innovation in response to economic and environmental challenges is highly valued. The knowledge and skills that students develop through their learning in Agricultural and Horticultural Science open pathways to a wide range of career opportunities, both in New Zealand and elsewhere.
Note: Primary products arise from primary industries that form the basis of modern primary production. These comprise a group of sectors including:
- agriculture
- aquaculture
- dairy manufacturing
- equine
- forestry
- horticulture
- seafood
- sports turf.
Note: The Agricultural and Horticultural Science subject predominately stops at the site gate, while the Agribusiness subject covers primary industry businesses involved along the entire primary production value chain. This includes manufacture, production operations, storage, processing, distribution of product and supplies, marketing of primary products and items made from them, along with support industries such as fertiliser companies, veterinarians, rural consultants and accountants.
Big Ideas and Significant Learning
Big Ideas are derived from the Learning Area essence statement and capture the essence of a subject, ensuring coherence rather than fragmentation of learning. At the subject level, they inform the Significant Learning – learning that is critical for students to know, understand, and do in relation to a subject by the end of each Curriculum Level. This covers knowledge, skills, competencies, and attitudes and also includes level-appropriate contexts students should encounter in senior secondary education.
Significant Learning is collated into a Learning Matrix and progresses across Curriculum Levels 6-8. Teachers can use the Learning Matrix as a tool to construct learning programmes that cover all the 'not to be missed' learning in a subject. There is no prescribed order to the Learning Matrix within each level. A programme of learning might begin with a context that is relevant to the local area of the school or an idea that students are particularly interested in. This topic or context has to relate to at least one Big Idea and may also link to other Big Ideas. The Learning Matrix is designed so that educators have the freedom to create courses that are both flexible and coherent.
Agricultural and Horticultural Science has three closely interrelated Big Ideas.
The agriculture and horticulture sciences connect places of purposeful production with people's wellbeing
The purpose of agricultural and horticultural science and of primary production is to improve oranga whānui for individuals, communities, and wider collectives. Oranga whānui includes economic, social, cultural, legal, technological, and environmental outcomes that result from primary production. For whānau, hapu and iwi, improvement of oranga whānui may be described as enhancing mana, of not only individuals, but also of collectives. This Big Idea is about the purposeful nature of agricultural and horticultural production: every product is grown to be used.
Primary producers understand and manage life processes
Primary producers understand and manage life processes of plants and livestock in order to gain particular product outcomes. Management practices involve working with natural cycles and life processes, and responding to ever-changing environmental, economic, and political factors. Primary producers have a role in guardianship, and mātauranga Māori informs this. Understanding how living systems work, and the ways that primary producers enhance these through management practices, is essential to successful primary production. They learn about soils, plants and livestock, growing environments and management practices required to produce primary products. This Big Idea joins up learning that can be gained through multiple knowledge systems across the breadth of agricultural and horticultural practice, science, Pacific knowledges and mātauranga Māori. It provides one of many entry points to the natural world and Te Taiao, as these apply to agricultural and horticultural practices. This Big Idea also provides scope for educators to consider ethical care of animals.
Primary production systems must be sustainable in every way
Primary producers consider social and economic viability over the short and the long term. Production systems are connected to the wider world and are affected by changing environments, seasonal and climate changes, markets, and social licence, which also includes ethical considerations. On- and off-site environmental decisions impact the sustainability of resources, ecosystems, and enterprises. Our relationship with place has meaning and influences how we connect with and understand the environment and value resources. Mātauranga Māori is used to inform these decisions.
This Big Idea captures 'not-to-be-missed' learning because Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific countries need to manage tensions between limited resources, and growing demands and needs of populations. This Big Idea gives educators scope to plan learning that leads students through the web of interrelationships that supports our lives, and to consider ways to make our production systems resilient. Making 'production systems' the subject of this Big Idea gives educators scope to develop students' systems thinking capabilities, and to extend exceptional students in levels 2 and 3.
Development of the Big Ideas
The key concepts of 'Producers systematically manage life processes' and 'Production systems must be sustainable', were used to develop the Big Idea on understanding and management of life processes and the third Big Idea on production systems being sustainable. The key concepts of 'Primary producers produce for a market', and 'Producers must make a profit' were woven into the first Big Idea, which is about places of purposeful production for people's wellbeing.
Significant Learning across all curriculum levels
This section provides values and a philosophical basis for Agricultural and Horticultural Science. These understandings underpin and are woven throughout learning and assessment in this subject.
Agricultural and Horticultural Science draws on the richness of multiple knowledge systems in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific countries that inform our understanding of the world. This means teachers can design learning contexts and select examples that are relevant to, inspire, and affirm all the students they engage with in their classes.
Agricultural and Horticultural Science benefits from he mātāpono principles that derive from te ao Māori thinking and from Pacific knowledges, giving students multiple frameworks of values and concepts to use as they consider learning within the three Big Ideas of the subject.
Key Competencies in Agricultural and Horticultural Science
Develop Key Competencies through Agricultural and Horticultural Science
The multi-faceted nature of Agricultural and Horticultural Science gives students the chance to develop their systems thinking ability, and many opportunities to appreciate perspectives other than their own.
Agricultural and Horticultural Science sits across three learning areas, each with its own inquiry model:
- Science, with its scientific inquiry model
- Social Science, with its social science inquiry model
- Technology, with its design thinking model.
Teachers can draw on these different models to design learning programmes that help students become versatile thinkers, communicators, and contributors.
Thinking
Students in Agricultural and Horticultural Science will:
- develop their design thinking ability as well as their sense of agency through technology-based learning contexts
- extend their critical thinking and systems thinking abilities through considering the interconnected and multi-disciplinary questions that Agricultural and Horticultural Science addresses.
Using language symbols and text
Students in Agricultural and Horticultural Science will:
- extend their use of language, symbols, and text to include industry-specific and context-dependent terminology
- appreciate aspects of mātauranga Māori that may be accessed through te reo Māori
- make sense of information derived from a variety of media
- develop skills in discerning appropriate sources of information and advice.
Relating to others
Students in Agricultural and Horticultural Science will:
- understand principles of whanaungatanga
- understand multiple perspectives.
Participating and contributing
Students in Agricultural and Horticultural Science will:
- develop oral communication skills through participating in and contributing to group learning, role plays, and practical exercises.
Managing self
Students in Agricultural and Horticultural Science will:
- develop their systems thinking ability
- appreciate perspectives other than their own
- build their mana motuhake
- increase their self-knowledge and sense of how they fit into the world
- build their sense of agency through practical projects.
This section of New Zealand Curriculum Online provides general guidance on integrating the Key Competencies into the daily activities of the school and its teaching and learning programmes.
Introduction to sample course outlines
Sample Course Outlines are being produced to help teachers and schools understand the new NCEA Learning Matrix and Achievement Standards. The draft Course Outlines that were published at the end of Phase 1, Level 1 product development are now being taken down. Work will continue on these, reflecting the changes noted in the SEG responses, and the additional detail that will be provided in Phase 2 products. They will be re-published for the next cycle of feedback on the Phase 2 products in early August 2021. Exemplars of student work will be provided after the Pilot phase in 2022.
Assessment Matrix
Unpacking The Standards
These statements help to unpack the ways in which the Achievement Standards assess the Significant Learning in the Learning Matrix.
1.1 (Internal) Demonstrate understanding of practices used to manage life processes in Agriculture and Horticulture
This standard covers how and why we manage life processes in Agricultural and Horticultural Science. Students are expected to demonstrate knowledge of multiple life processes that primary producers manage in producing a product.
Learning about specific management practices and how they are carried out offers opportunities for students to participate and to develop practical skills; there are many ways students can engage virtually. They are also required to understand why a range of management practices are used to manage life processes. This would involve exploring a range of management practices across various life processes in plants or animals, or both. Consideration of management approaches such as maramataka offer opportunities to include a te ao Māori understanding of growth. Students will link each management practice carried out by primary producers to both the life processes involved and to the production of a product for use.
Higher grades of performance might involve identifying how timing, seasons and location factors impact the management of production systems, and linking management practices to why they are significant to produce an end product.
Assessing this standard internally allows students to take a deeper dive into contexts of particular interest or local relevance. It allows students to engage in the breadth of content relating to life processes.
1.2 (Internal) Demonstrate understanding of how primary producers optimise growing environments
This standard covers how ideal conditions are created for growing plants and animals. It requires students to show their understanding of the ways primary producers exercise their role as kaitiaki: how they manage and enhance growing environments in order to meet their dual purposes of sustainability and production.
Students will engage in a wide range of learning activities including practical work to explore:
- aspects of the growing environment that impact on primary production, and
- how each aspect enhances or constrains the growing environment for the organisms being produced or grown.
Students will use a range of approaches such as investigations, practical activities, observations, and modelling to explore aspects of the environment such as wind, air (carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen), water, soil, temperature, nutrients, humidity, light, snow, frost, hail, organisms.
While this standard is likely to have a strong focus on soils, it also includes other growing environments such as water: awa, moana.
Optimising growing conditions is more than just configuring abiotic factors: it includes enhancing the mana of and respecting the mauri of the whenua and moana. This is an opportunity for students to include aspects of mātāpono amongst their discussion of the management principles and practices: mauri, mana, tapu, and rāhui of kaitiakitanga.
Assessment involves students making links between specific management practices and the factors that affect the growing environment for a particular context. They are then expected to identify the effect of a practice on aspects of growth of primary products or organisms.
1.3 (External) Demonstrate understanding of purpose and place in agricultural and horticultural production
This standard covers why we grow, what we grow, and why we grow it here. It requires students to show their understanding of the primary sector and its many purposes for production. This involves identifying and understanding the regions: rohe/iwi where primary production happens, as well as the specific purpose for producing particular primary products.
A range of factors and influences affect what is grown where, by who, and why. These include:
● environmental factors (soil, climate, topography) that vary across Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific Islands
● whakapapa – historical land use and the origins of whenua/moana
● people’s perceptions around land use, such as tapu and rāhui, consumer demand and preferences (local, national, or international), and political and legislative requirements
● economic aspects such as labour availability, market demand, and technological efficiencies
● the principles of he mātāpono - for considering how primary production is undertaken and understood by Māori
● aesthetic, practical, and cultural considerations for amenity horticulture.
Students are expected to identify a range of primary production methods or industries and what they produce. Students will describe the various conditions, factors, or influences. In each case they can make connections between the primary production and where it takes place.
Different approaches that supports this understanding include: field work, research to collect information and data, interviews with primary producers, local or community examples of primary production.
This standard involves application of knowledge to a range of local and national contexts.
1.4 (External) Demonstrate understanding of sustainability in agriculture and horticulture
This standard covers how agricultural and horticultural systems survive and thrive. It requires students to show they understand how a broad range of management practices used in primary production systems impact the environment. A range of contexts is expected, including local and national production systems, with students demonstrating that they can link:
- identified management practices used in producing a primary product
- specific impacts of those practices on the environment, such as air, water, soil, land, or living organisms
- the consequences of those impacts, for people (social implications), other living things (ecological implications), the economy or the physical environment.
Students will identify why management practices are used and how that use affects the environment in each case. This would include how good practice mitigates adverse impacts. This standard provides opportunities for exploring the choices and decisions made by primary producers, including how mātauranga Māori and he mātāpono are used to inform decisions.