Posted July 1996
by R. Bawden
Head of the School of Agriculture
Hawkesbury Agricultural College, Australia
Worldwide, institutions of agricultural higher education are facing a serious crisis quite unlike anything they have had to face before. The periodic challenges of falling student enrolments, diminishing graduate employment prospects and declining community and political support with its resource implications have been around for as long as the institutions themselves. These are called "tactical" crises. The current "strategic" crisis is much deeper: it relates to the self identity of professional agriculturists and to the prevailing model of agricultural science in which they are trained. This in turn raises questions about the relevance of the institutions themselves and their future sustainability.
Unlike their counterparts in medicine, law or even teaching, agriculture graduates do not have an easily identifiable profession to enter when they leave the institution. There are, therefore, very few guidelines to help in the design of curricula appropriate to the practising professional agriculturist. If it is not clearly known what graduates will actually do as practitioners in the field once they enter the workforce, then it is difficult to help them learn how to do it while they are at university; if it is not known who the clients of the profession are, and the nature of the problems they face, then it is equally difficult to decide what scientific and technical knowledge the graduates need.
Universities frequently respond to this uncertain situation by offering non integrated specialized "bodies of scientific and technological knowledge" on the premise that any scientific knowledge acquired by students could be useful in improving levels of farm production and productivity when applied to a practical situation. Moreover, academics are generally unsatisfactory role models for their students since most university teachers of agriculture are discipline or subject specialists who have had little if any training as educators; typically they teach as they were taught. Where they are also active as research scientists, they reinforce the importance of specialist, fragmentary knowledge and of the specialized research methods gained through their own postgraduate studies. As a result, their students are seldom exposed to the professional knowledge and skills relevant to participatory work with rural communities in collaborative projects designed to make sustainable improvements to the quality of life, production systems, supporting infrastructure and the total environment.
There is growing public concern about the negative environmental impacts of many of the intensive agricultural technologies that focus solely on improving farm productivity. Increasingly, society and farmers alike are demanding that agricultural professionals redesign farming systems so as to address these destructive impacts on the quality of life of many rural people as well as on the environments in which they live. The challenge for rural people is to learn new ways of thinking and evaluating as a basis for developing new ways of acting appropriate to the complexity of the circumstances in which they live and work. Those in the service sectors, such as agricultural extension, will have to play a major role in facilitating this transformation.
Only through holistic thinking will holistic practices be developed that lead to systemic improvements, as environmentally responsible and ethically defensible as they are economically desirable, culturally feasible and socially and politically acceptable. The development of new systems that ensure rural well being is, therefore, dependent on individuals and groups of people developing the skills to think in terms of sustainable systems and to value that capability. The challenge for agricultural educators is to design learning environments and educational strategies where these new ways of integrating "thinking with acting" can be developed.
It is not as if there is a "grand science" of agriculture to help this learning process &endash;an all encompassing set of theories and philosophies that provides holistic explanations of agriculture as a sustainable human activity. Agricultural science is, in effect, the sum of many sciences, both basic and applied, focused essentially on aspects of crop and animal production. As for philosophy, it is usually ignored altogether, at least in undergraduate curricula. The irony is that, at the very time society is looking to agricultural universities and colleges to help in the holistic (systemic) development of sustainable agricultural and rural systems, the institutions are facing the prospect of becoming non sustainable systems themselves.
This is not a simple tactical crisis that can be addressed merely by amending the curriculum to include new "subjects" such as environmental science, social science and philosophy. This is a complex strategic crisis that will only be met through serious re evaluation of the entire purpose, function and organization of institutions of agricultural higher education, including profound review of the very nature of the prevailing models of agricultural science.
This is not a novel suggestion. In recent years a number of studies have pointed to similar conclusions. Among the most significant of these are the extensive evaluations of agricultural education assistance conducted by major international organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (Hansen, 1989), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (1991) and the World Bank (1992).
The main issues of most concern to the evaluations were:
In a creative response to the situation, Hansen (1990) proposed that the time had come for a "new order" of agricultural universities in the developing world -- "post-neoclassical" institutions, as he called them -- which would be characterized by the following four attributes:
Without the benefit of such lessons and insights from these international reviews, a number of institutions of agricultural higher education have long been engaged in programmes of fundamental reform. In Australia, for example, Hawkesbury Agricultural College committed itself in 1978 to self-transformation (Bawden, 1992) and has become an organization that bears remarkable similarities to the "post-neoclassical" university envisaged by Hansen (1990).
Three concepts are central to the way Hawkesbury responds to the challenges of more responsible agriculture for sustainable rural development. The first relates to professional competencies for agriculturists, for which the word "praxis" -- defined as the art and craft of being a practitioner who is consciously informed by theories, values and beliefs -- has been adopted. The praxis that both students and faculty are attempting to develop, and around which the curricula are designed, relates to the notion of learning how to become a "facilitator of sustainable rural development".
The second key concept concerns the use of systems theories and philosophies by development facilitators as essential aspects of their praxis for dealing with the complex and uncertain issues that characterize everyday rural and agricultural development. Thus, the word systemic relates to holistic or integrated ways in which people deal with problematic situations, or systems thinking in action: systemic development practitioners use systems theories and philosophies to inform their praxis.
And, finally, there is the aspect of critical learning as it relates both to the characteristics of systemic development facilitators as practitioners and to the outcomes of their praxis -- individuals and groups of rural people learning critically how to improve the situations in which they exist. Thus, systemic development facilitators are critical learners, being consciously critical of their own practices and contexts and of the theories, values and beliefs that inform them, while attempting to encourage others (especially their "clients") to do the same.
This emphasis on the three notions of praxis, systemic and critical learning, and on the concept of agriculture as a vehicle for the sustainable and integrated development of rural people, their resources and the environments in which they operate, represents a reinterpretation of the agricultural practitioner. This has led to an institution of agricultural higher education that is very unconventional in its organization purposes, functions and curricula, and in the major activities of its faculty and students.
The essence of the reforms at Hawkesbury can perhaps be best conveyed by offering the following points of comparison as statements of transformation from what used to happen there in the mid-1970s to what happens currently. To illustrate the strong similarities between these developments and the lessons learned from the international studies mentioned above, the points are presented under Hansen's (1990) four post-neoclassical attributes.
- From the view of agricultural improvements centred on increasing agricultural productivity through technology to the view of agriculture as a vehicle for improving the quality of the lives and environments of rural people through "development through collaborative learning".
- From a mission to provide trained technical labour essentially to fill public-service positions to direct involvement as an agency of development through the learning/research activities of its faculty and students working together with rural people to deal with their everyday problems.
- From management strategies designed to maintain the stability of the organization to strategies deliberately focused on the management of complex change and conflict for sustainability in the future.
- From a teaching institution providing graduates for unspecified jobs in agriculture to a learning organization committed to developing and sharing innovative ways of dealing with complex, problematic situations in rural Australia and beyond, and to the development of rural communities through systemic community learning.
- From an organization depending solely on government funds to educate students to meet national labour needs to an international, development-focused institution, attracting funds from a number of different sources to support an increasing number of development projects, at home and abroad.
- From a public-service institution linked in linear fashion with only a few other organizations in its environment to an autonomous institution linked through a large number of extensive networks to rural individuals, families and communities and to many other organizations concerned with agricultural and rural development, at home and abroad, including rural schools, colleges, agribusinesses and government agencies.
- From an essentially bureaucratic institution hierarchically structured around inflexible discipline-based departments (and confined essentially to the natural sciences) to a collegial, self-organizing, self-managing learning organization, in which the predominant management structures are flexible task forces composed of people with backgrounds in the social as well as the natural sciences, working and learning together on defined projects.
- From an elite institution accessible only to relatively high-performing school-leavers to an institution that is accessible to a wide range of people through the provision of a "multi-entry level" spectrum of curricula (two-year diplomas, three- and four-year undergraduate degrees, course-work and research postgraduate degrees), as well as non-formal learning opportunities and participatory development projects that involve students, faculty and "clients" co-learning in collaborative ways.
- From a curriculum focused on the acquisition of technical and scientific knowledge that the students expect to apply only when they graduate and enter the workforce to one that focuses on the students' enhancement of their own praxis as critical systemic development facilitators
- From systematic (building-block) curricula, where students are taught the knowledge that the teachers believe they need to know, to systemic (integrated) curricula, where students learn how to deal with "real world" agricultural and rural situations through their experiential involvement with them and through their integration of theories, values and beliefs into appropriate practices.
- From presentation by the teacher to the student of discipline-based subjects, designed to progress from basic scientific knowledge to more advanced scientific theory and applied technology, to the co-involvement of student and teacher in theme-based experiential projects that progress from relatively simple "problems to be solved" to much more complex ¿¿situations to be improved systemically".
- From instructive education strategies involving lectures and demonstrations in which the students play a passive and dependent role to interactive strategies that facilitate the active and interdependent involvement of students in a "self-development for development" process.
- From the role of teachers as purveyors of "expert" knowledge gained through their own discipline and reinforced by their ongoing discipline-based research to teachers as co-learning facilitators of the development of students as active, critical, creative, systemic and enterprising learners, problem solvers and "situation improvers".
- From a single, predominant world-view of production improvement through science and technology to an appreciation and application of multiple world-views for systemic and sustainable improvements to the lives of rural people, established through close collaboration of people with diverse ways of thinking and acting.
- From a highly structured educational environment in which each student is assessed by his or her capacity to pass prescribed subject matter examinations to one that is characterized by uncertainty and complexity, and in which assessment is based on the capability of each student to present evidence of the development of his or her own praxis as an increasingly critical and systemic learner to a level appropriate to the demands of the next phase of the programme, or graduation from it.
The changes in Hawkesbury's School of Agriculture and Rural Development have never been static nor perfect. Like the cooperating rural families and communities with whom they work, faculty members are continually attempting to develop, improve and transform themselves through their critical and systemic praxis. And like their rural counterparts, they too must spend time critically reflecting on their day-to-day activities of dealing with the complex, uncertain, chaotic and often stressful environments in which they operate. Thus, the faculty must learn not just about better agriculture and rural development, but also about better community and organizational development by learning about their own community and organization.
Furthermore, they must learn how to do this in critical, systemic and developmental ways that help them to integrate what they learn from their own experiences (experiential learning) and the theories and philosophies of others (propositional learning) and from observing the practices of others (practical learning).
Above all, they must learn how to share and promote such learning with others -- especially their students and clients. Curriculum design under these circumstances is based on the notion of teachers and students co-learning in relevant problematic situations with the aim of developing improvements, and thus developing a relevant systemic and critical praxis as they go. Day by day, students and faculty alike are learning about a multitude of different situations, some organized as formal learning or research projects and others as more informal, ad hoc situations. Sometimes they learn as individuals, but more often than not they learn cooperatively, in teams or groups. In this manner, they attempt to replicate the circumstances confronting those who live and work in rural situations, developing a praxis appropriate to facilitating sustainable development.
Like any other healthy critical learning organization, the Hawkesbury faculty community has, over the past decade and a half, been characterized by its energy and collective enthusiasm, as well as by its readiness to debate important differences in interpretation and in opinions of experiences, theories, values and beliefs. Indeed, critical debate on all these dimensions has been actively encouraged for the development of the faculty community and its environment.
Bawden, R.J. 1992. "Systems approaches to agricultural development: the Hawkesbury experience". In: P. Teng & F. de Vries, eds. "Systems approaches for agricultural development." Barking, UK, Elsevier Applied Science.
FAO, 1991. "Higher education in agriculture: status, issues and ideas for future development". Expert Consultation on Strategy Options for Higher Agricultural Education. Rome, FAO.
Hansen, G.E. 1989. "Universities for development: lessons for enhancing the role of agricultural universities in developing countries". Evaluation Occasional Paper No. 31. Washington, DC, USA, United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Hansen, G.E. 1990. "Beyond the neoclassical university: agricultural higher education in the developing world. An interpretative essay". Program Evaluation Report No. 20. Washington, DC, USA, United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
World Bank. 1992. "World Bank assistance to agricultural higher education 1964-1990". Report No. 10751. Washington, DC, USA, World Bank.
 
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