Teaching agroecology: preparing students for navigating uncharted territory

ABSTRACT

Agroecologists understand that farming and food systems are more complex than the aggregation of their components. This realization drives our choices of learning strategies and activities that will prepare students for complexity and uncertainty. Our quest for a just, sustainable, and nutritious food system adequate to equitably serve everyone on the planet today and into the future is an enormous challenge. An undertaking of this magnitude will be met only with major adjustments informed by thoughtful teaching and practicing problem solving skills through a new educational lens. The principles of agroecology help us focus this lens on the wicked problems of today and the future, and prepare students for navigating uncharted territory. The dimensions of such education are broad, transdisciplinary, and long term. In this commentary, we explore agroecology as an emerging platform to understand the holistic nature of systems, to navigate the complications of unpredictable change, and to deal with how we can frame relevant questions for ourselves and our students in a rapidly changing biological and social environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecology
• systems learning
• transformative learning
• unpredictable future
• long-term food systems

Acknowledgments

We thank the International Panel of Experts in Food Systems (IPES-Food) for their extensive publications and reports on the transformation of future of food systems using agroecology, especially their most recent report titled Smoke and Mirrors: examining competing framings of food system sustainability: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and nature-based solutions, from which much of our text regarding the history and definition of agroecology was adapted (IPES-Food 2022).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).