The seeds of a green revolution. Innovations in agricultural education

What will tomorrow's agriculture look like? According to the FAO report"World Agriculture: 2015/2030", the ^21st century is facing a second, "doubly green" revolution, driven by advances in agricultural technologies.

The challenges of productivity persist, while protecting the environment, with new technologies that must be accessible to the most disadvantaged.

And what about education?

Are there any signs of the coming revolution in education?

In general education, we're tending to come across initiatives such as the school garden, or food education from the earliest age, as in France, where this is becoming a priority enshrined in the law on the future of agriculture, food and forestry (LAAAF).

In Australia, the concept is taken a step further: the "Agriculture in Education" initiative, launched in 2015, is investing $2 million in promoting the agricultural sector at all levels of education and offers a wide range of teaching resources, from writing a business plan for a market garden to courses on food safety...

A few examples

A number of recent publications report on teaching experiences in this field.

1. The University of Colombo (Sri Lanka) and the University of Stockholm have been conducting a joint experiment inmobile learning in agriculture for several years, using twitter as a pedagogical tool to deliver micro-lessons via sms to a network of young farmers. To avoid too great a flow of information, the learners' network is closed, with each one able to "follow" the project coordinators exclusively.
   
   These micro-lessons are structured around a question-and-answer logic, to fit in with the 140-character maximum of a tweet. The question is posed at 8 a.m., and learners can submit as many answers as they wish during the day; the lesson is broadcast at the end of the day. Despite the technical hurdles, the results are generally well received, and provide food for thought for similar experiments in the future.
   
   
2. A second experiment takes us into the highly topical field of agroecology in France. Let's recall the context: in 2012, the Ministry set itself the target of "the majority of farms committed to agro-ecology by 2025" with a plan called Enseigner à produire autrement.
   
   At an agricultural high school near Toulouse, students are conducting group action research, in the form of trials, in a dedicated area. It's all up to the students: they design the protocols, analyze the data and communicate them to their peers and experts, just like researchers.
   
   Another encouraging experiment, which shows how experimentation is becoming essential, in a logic of ecological transition.
   
   

These examples are far from summing up the possibilities in the sector.
Virtual reality, for example, offers very interesting prospects in agriculture, in terms of practical observation of soil, plant growth and the impact of human intervention.

Virtual plants remove us from the (temporal) laws of nature: students can create three-dimensional representation models, such as the joint INRIA-CIRAD-INRA Virtual plants experiment, a plant growth simulator. For those who want to find out more, researchers have put online a free software platform on plant modeling, OpenAela, with tutorials and examples of how it's done.

Finally, the ministerial portal Pollen presents examples of pedagogical innovation in agricultural education: agroecology in the inverted classroom, mobile and collaborative work, the construction of an earthen village, and so on.

A true revolution in terms of pedagogical possibilities....

Illustration: Bea Serendipity via Scandinavian

References

Dissanayeke, U. et al. "Developing and testing an m-Learning tool to facilitate guided-informal learning in agriculture" in International Journal on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions (ICTer) (2016) http://icter.sljol.info/articles/abstract/10.4038/icter.v8i3.7165/

Authors supra. "Twitter micro-blogging based mobile learning approach to enhance the agriculture education process". International Conference Mobile learning (2013) http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED562387.pdf

Jean-Claude Gracia. "Variations pédagogiques pour une formation agroécologique: Observation d'une expérience de formation agroécologique conduite avec l'exploitation d'un lycée agricole".
Colloque Eduquer au monde de demain, ESPE de Clermont-Ferrand, 2016. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01314858/document

Modeling plant morphogenesis at different scales, from genes to phenotypes - Virtual Plants - Inria
http://www.inria.fr/equipes/virtual-plants

Pollen - Sharing pedagogical innovations in agricultural education
http://pollen.chlorofil.fr/