Book Review

THE EARTHSCAN READER IN SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

EDITED BY JULES PRETTY

EARTHSCAN          2005

PART V

 

PART 3: SOCIAL PERSPECTIVES

Perspective 14: The Hawkesbury Experience: Tales from a Road Less Travelled by Richard Bawden

Introduction

A quarter of century has now passed since the meeting at which the entire Agriculture School of 50-or so ‘aggies’ at hawkesbury Agriculture College, that I had just been appointed to ‘lead’, took four decisions that would make the beginnings of a radical approach to curriculum reform (later to embrace the whole issue of ‘rural transformation’) that has persisted virtually to this day.

1. We would ‘go back to basics’ and start the whole process of curriculum reform afresh with the exploration of two deceptively ‘simple’ questions:

a)      What did we mean when we spoke of agriculture? (especially in the context of what role it played in the development of rural Australia – past and present),

b)      What did we mean when we spoke of education? (especially in the context of learning and development, and thence curriculum and pedagogy).

1. We would focus our attention particularly on the identification of those competencies that we believed could/should be needed by the next generation of agricultural/rural practitioners to meet future challenges as well as deal better with the present.
2. We would ‘situate’ our explorations and discussions within a context of:

a)      An appreciation of the complexity of both current and recent historical changes not just in Australian agriculture, but in the communities and environments in which rural people lived, especially in New South Wales.

b)      A critical concern about the nature of existing services that were available to rural people, especially higher education, extension, and research, the policies they reflected, and the paradigm that ‘drove’ them all.

c)      An acute awareness of the dynamic circumstances that were characterizing higher education in Australia at that time, especially in agriculture.

1. We would approach our tasks as a team of ‘action researchers’ or ‘community of action learners’, creating and participating in an overarching action research programme as well as in specific projects in the development of our curricula, of ourselves, of our organization, and of the networks in which we become embedded. In the process we collaborated closely with each other, as well as with various other actors who were concerned with rural conditions in Australia and/or with curriculum reform in higher education per se.

 

In addition to the usual concerns about theory and practice in agriculture that engage the attention of all agricultural educators, we also committed ourselves, as action researchers to including concerns about the theory and practice of practice itself (predating what Donald Schon, 1987, would later explore in his book Educating the Reflective Practitioner). We co-opted the word praxis to express the way practitioners use theories (of both types) to inform the practical actions that they take and reflections on those actions to trigger the search for new theories. We thus came to accept praxis as a human ‘property’ that ‘emerges’ through the constant everyday interplay between theory (or understanding) and practice (or action), or as the dynamic synthesis between the inner world of abstract, concepts and the outer world of concrete experiences.

The foundations of our praxis

Observations on a changing praxis

Phase 1: Researched systems

Phase 2: Researching systems

Phase 3: Critical systemic discourse

Postscript

And there it is – a brief tale from a road less travelled in which a group of us at Hawkesbury, over a period of 25 or so years, changed our praxis in response to both the changing circumstances that we continued to face over that time, and the literature that we read as we went. Our twin foundations lay with experiential learning and systemics and, most significantly, we tried throughout to ‘walk our talk’. We did the best that we could to develop as effective experiential learners ourselves – learning to interrelate theory with practice, reflection with action – even as we were learning to facilitate the experiential learning of others.

There have been some very significant, often dramatic, changes in rural Australia over that quarter century, and our students, graduates, project collaborators and we have been in thick of them. It is of course quite impossible to evaluate our actual impact but there is little doubt that we have made a difference. We have witnessed very significant shifts in the public discourse, in rural and urban society alike, with respect to ‘sustainable developments in the countryside’ and we have seen profound shifts in government policy and bureaucratic strategy. Most importantly, rural development in Australia now has a human face; it’s about people trying to make sense of, and then take responsible actions in, complex, dynamic environments.

There is, however, a very long way yet to go. The changes that have occurred in development practices and policies, though very significant, have not yet really got to the heart of the matter that we really do not know what it is that we have got to do to achieve what Prozesky (1998) refers to as inclusive wellbeing – a focus for development that accords with the four basic ethical principles of autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability that are being promoted in Europe as a normative framework for related discourse in bioethics and biolaw (Rendtorff and Kemp, 2000).

Furthermore, and tragically, we continue to see far too few attempts within the academy anywhere across the globe, to really develop alternative and complementary paradigms for sustainable development that are at once both scholarly and practical – and oh so urgently needed.

Let me leave the last words to Ulrich Beck who has done more than anyone to influence my own thinking, in the context of inclusive wellbeing, on the need to ‘really face up to the challenges of modernity and the re-design of relationships between ‘people and their environments’ in systemic, rather than plainly ecological, manner.

The natural world, sapped by society and industrially endangered, has become the battle ground for its own survival, yet the ecological movement remains trapped in a naturalistic misunderstanding. It reacts to and acts upon a blend of nature and society that remains uncomprehended, in the name of a nature no longer extant, which is at the same time supposed to serve as model for the reorganization of an ecological society.

The confusion of nature and society obscures from view another central political insight: the independence of destruction and protest. Protests against the despoliation of nature are culturally and symbolically mediated. They cannot be deciphered according to the calculus of hazards, but must be interpreted through the inner and personal experience of social ways of life.

Beck, 1995

 

Perspective 15: Social Capital and Collective Management of Resources by Jules Pretty