Mock accidents, real lessons: Inside Occupational Safety Management class
Texas A&M Agricultural and Systems Management course prepares students for real-world jobsite risks
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A body lies motionless beneath a front-end loader. A coworker’s story doesn’t quite match the other witnesses. A College Station police officer takes notes.
Relax, true crime fans, no one died. Working in teams of three, 70 junior- and senior-level students investigate as if someone did and learn just how messy the truth can be after something goes wrong on a jobsite.
This is what it’s like to take Occupational Safety Management, AGSM 360, a course created inside the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering that turns a fabrication shop on West Campus into one of the most talked-about classrooms in Aggieland.
More than lecture, less than luck
Douglas Kingman, Ph.D., an instructional professor who has taught the course for two decades, said most students walk in assuming workplace danger looks like machinery or chemicals. That’s rarely the whole picture.
The course covers endless safety and injury accounts and official data related to hazards in the spectrum of work environments. Students also learn about the standards set by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA, and the National Institute for Occupational and Safety and Health, NIOSH, that are designed to mitigate risks.
See what Agricultural Systems Management has to offer
AGSM 360 is one course within the Agricultural Systems Management program, which prepares graduates to manage people, money and machines as production managers, equipment managers or technical professionals across the food and agriculture industries.
Students spend the semester working through case studies, OSHA and NIOSH statistics, and hands-on demonstrations: nail guns fired into work boots, balloons of red dye simulating impact injuries, even an overcharged drill battery that blew apart in front of the class.
Kingman said the course treats the “why” behind accidents with the same weight as the “how” — how workers recognize hazards, why they take shortcuts and how a single rushed decision by a new employee or experienced professional on a job site can carry consequences no one saw coming.
“There is a lot of humanness to jobsite safety,” Kingman said. “And there are cultures of safety at every company – good and bad. The idea is to teach students the framework so that they can see the difference between companies that do and don’t take safety seriously. It prepares them to walk into their job on Day 1 and have the ability to review injury data, create training materials and make judgement calls about risk, rather than learn the hard way after someone is hurt.”
A mock incident with real consequences
The semester builds toward a capstone investigation. Kingman stages a fatal accident at a fictional jobsite, complete with professional actors, a real police officer and a mannequin “victim.” Students interview witnesses who were coached to tell slightly different versions of events and piece together what happened.
“The investigation mimics real life,” Kingman said. “I do expert witness testimony and reports for attorneys, and I see these all the time. The idea is to introduce students to these scenarios and reinforce everything they’ve learned throughout the semester.”
Kingman pushed the exercise further this year, requesting an actual mock OSHA inspection. Two cotton industry safety consultants who serve on the department’s External Advisory Committee used an authentic redacted OSHA report as their model.
Their findings and the violations tied to it became the final exam.
The External Advisory Committee consists of industry leaders, former students and professionals in related fields who help guide the department’s academic, research and strategic directions.
A course that reaches beyond one department
While AGSM 360 is required for agricultural systems management majors, Kingman said the course’s strong reputation draws a mix of majors, including mechanical engineering students, architecture and industrial distribution majors, construction science students and future agricultural education teachers. These future professionals go on to train and influence workers and manage jobsite risk.
Students also produce their own 3-5-minute safety training videos. Kingman said this assignment has helped some land jobs before graduation.
Kingman said he routinely hears how valuable the course was to former students. He said many new employees within related industries are often assigned safety responsibilities, whether it is in their background or not, because a jobsite’s success is built on its safety culture.
“Students find the course to be interesting and entertaining but it’s also very serious at times,” he said. “It is something that can set them apart in the workforce and that they can apply immediately on any worksite.”
