Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
and accentuation of the conf licts already existing between conservation and the productive
use of agricultural land and forest, rather than focusing on a collaborative study leading to the
development of multifunctional rural landscapes. Within the production stream too, the links
between production, processing, marketing and consumption necessary for an understanding
of sustainable food systems is being ignored.
The proposal here is to have individual course units in ecological agriculture and agroecol-
ogy at the very least. Beyond this, a broader and more integrated curriculum is needed to make
students more aware of open, interactive, evolving and dynamic farming and food systems.
Agroecosystems are more complex than the collection of their mechanical and biological com-
ponents. To achieve better awareness by students, the emphasis in new courses is on experien-
tial learning. The 'Hawkesbury Experience' emanating from Australia since the early 1980s
and the innovations in 'systems agriculture' curricula have been inspirational and instructive
to many educators designing courses in ecological agriculture (Bawden et al . 1984, 2000).
Instead of focusing on the structure and content of single courses offered at the university,
another approach is to concentrate on providing meaningful learning experiences, which
move the learners closer to the real world and confront challenges comparable to what they
will come across as graduate agroecologists (Lieblein et al . 2004). Examples and case studies
are drawn from organic agriculture and food systems. The focus is on students and their
learning, rather than on professors and teaching. The process of learning is at least as impor-
tant as the specific course content , therefore experiential ways that allow learning to take place
are adopted in preference to the traditional offering of lectures aimed at knowledge transfer.
When these components are developed as part of an integrated learning landscape, the new
educational environment often may be poorly understood by some colleagues in academia,
and seen by others as a threat to the establishment. Introducing many simultaneous changes in
courses and plans of study is often the reason for this perception of threat among academic
colleagues and students (Francis et al . 2001). It can also be a source of discomfort to students
unaccustomed to taking responsibility for their own education. One way to overcome the
resistance would be to initiate a totally experiential program rather than tinker with parts of it,
and then manage the process of transformation with faculty and students, the feasibility of
which was demonstrated at Hawkesbury in the 1980s (Bawden 2000). However, the ideal cir-
cumstances that would enable such elaborate academic experiments have become increasingly
rare. In proposing a new field of study called agroecology, we envisage an approach and a
program of study substantially different from conventional programs in agriculture and land
management, but quite feasible within the institutional and economic structures of a contem-
porary university or college. The educational model being developed in agroecology and eco-
logical agriculture in the Nordic region and parts of the USA has important implications for
agricultural education in general, and is certainly not confined to organic agriculture. In the
same way, research and education in organic practices and systems, and their adoption by a
small but growing fraction of farmers, is providing new directions to conventional farming,
although this impact is difficult to measure.
How ongoing research informs education
An important principle in the design of organic farming education is the reliance on both
science-based and experience-based knowledge, and recognition of the role of values in setting
goals for development. Those in agricultural science recognise explicitly the importance of
technology and applications of the scientific method of testing alternative practices and
systems. Many people applaud the development of organic systems that are friendlier to the
environment than current conventional agricultural systems. However, even if the Fisher sta-
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