High impact sustainable transdisciplinary collaboration model for food justice

ABSTRACT

This article summarizes the development of a High Impact Sustainable Transdisciplinary Collaboration Model for Food Justice based on the work done by faculty from different disciplines—engineering, business, and agriculture—with their corresponding courses in the last 5 years. Our experience aims to show the general picture of sustainable entrepreneurship education through our transdisciplinary collaboration model to promote experiential learning, generating interest among students across traditional disciplinary boundaries to explore problems from different perspectives and create sustainable solutions in a concrete, real-life context. Our model requires transdisciplinary collaboration, where students from diverse academic majors develop the knowledge and skills associated with their respective fields and apply them in a unique setting to solve food security issues. This experience has been formalized into a Preparation, Action, Reflection, and Evaluation (P.A.R.E.) Community-Engaged Scholarship Model that infuses sustainability and that can be easily understood and transferred to other institutions with similar contexts and challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• food justice
• sustainability
• transdisciplinary
• collaboration model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly supported by the intramural research program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Program grant nos. 2019-68017-29694 and 2022-67022 and an Institutional Grant NA22OAR4170092 to the Texas Sea Grant College Program from the National Sea Grant Office, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce.The findings and conclusions in this preliminary publication have not been formally disseminated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy.