Exploring Co-learning in Agroecology

CHARLES “CHUCK” FRANCIS Author

09/19/2022 Added

23 Plays

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Professor emeritus, Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

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[00:00:00.750]The following presentation
[00:00:02.220]is part of the Agronomy and Horticulture Seminar Series
[00:00:05.790]at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
[00:00:09.195]And welcome to our first seminar of the semester.
[00:00:12.780]And it's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Chuck Francis,
[00:00:16.080]an Emeritus Professor here
[00:00:17.914]at the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture.
[00:00:21.056]He got his BS in Agronomy from UC Davis,
[00:00:25.200]and MS and PhD in Plant Breeding from Cornell.
[00:00:29.310]And his area focus for his research extension
[00:00:32.970]and teaching activities has been agronomy,
[00:00:36.120]crop rotations and farming systems,
[00:00:37.982]and he has expanded some of his teaching
[00:00:41.327]to include full-learning activities in agrocology,
[00:00:45.300]and that'll be the topic of his seminar for this afternoon.
[00:00:49.920]Chuck, take it away.
[00:00:50.832]Thank you, Sabrina.
[00:00:53.071]I'd urge you all work on the questionnaire
[00:00:54.750]while I do brief biography.
[00:00:58.140]Most of you in here are Emeritus,
[00:00:59.670]so you probably know the story already.
[00:01:02.520]Now, asked what the average age was in here,
[00:01:05.744](indistinct) why do all the Emeritus turn out?
[00:01:08.550]It's the cookies I think,
[00:01:11.308]but that's why I go to some.
[00:01:12.718](indistinct)
[00:01:14.785]Anyway, okay, there's a pre-survey
[00:01:17.640]to see what you think about co-learning
[00:01:19.350]at this point in time.
[00:01:21.330]And then at the end, while we're doing questions,
[00:01:24.323]there's a post-survey on the back.
[00:01:27.690]So we'll see what's changed in your opinions
[00:01:30.840]about co-learning as we define it.
[00:01:34.950]Learning is not a spectator sport,
[00:01:36.816]as you all know, as teachers.
[00:01:39.450]It involves participation by everybody.
[00:01:42.269]The question is what can we do
[00:01:44.070]to encourage participation as instructors?
[00:01:47.250]Co-learning is one of those things.
[00:01:52.230]This is where it starts,
[00:01:53.460]and I do wanna give credit to my co-teachers,
[00:01:59.280]co-learners from two groups.
[00:02:01.740]The first one is in Norway at their National University.
[00:02:07.050]It's had three different acronyms and names
[00:02:09.090]since I've been going there for 25 years.
[00:02:11.522]The latest one is NMBU,
[00:02:13.470]which is National University of,
[00:02:17.340]I forget what it is in Norwegian.
[00:02:18.780]I mean, I know what it is in Norwegian,
[00:02:20.130]but I forget the translation.
[00:02:22.770]Anyway, three, four of my colleagues here,
[00:02:25.980]Geir Lieblein, Marie Nicolaysen.
[00:02:29.580]Geir's a horticulturist.
[00:02:30.990]Marie is a medical anthropologist
[00:02:33.510]if you can imagine that,
[00:02:35.100]with a PhD at the University of Connecticut.
[00:02:37.980]She worked on AIDS.
[00:02:40.560]Tor Arvid is a soil biologist and agronomist.
[00:02:44.496]And Suzanne Morse is at the College of Atlantic
[00:02:47.850]in Bar Harbor, Maine,
[00:02:50.165]and she's a physiologist and worked closely with
[00:02:54.150]agroecologists like Miguel Altieri and Steve Gliessman , out
[00:02:57.870]in California.
[00:03:00.030]Then another set of colleagues
[00:03:01.650]are these folks in the Midwest,
[00:03:03.540]Mary Wiedonhoeft have from Iowa state,
[00:03:06.060]Paul Porter, Minnesota,
[00:03:08.155]and then colleagues from Dordt college
[00:03:10.380]where we for the last several years
[00:03:12.570]have been spending our time with students
[00:03:13.980]and then going out from there each day to visit farms.
[00:03:17.454]Rob DeHaan is a
[00:03:20.730]range ecologist
[00:03:21.870]and Jerry. Jeremy Hummel is an entomologist.
[00:03:24.720]So we have a pretty fair range of people
[00:03:27.290]in this interdisciplinary teaching team.
[00:03:29.190]So we bring a lot of different skills
[00:03:31.620]and different backgrounds to the table.
[00:03:34.920]And you would note,
[00:03:35.880]I think that we're sorely missing people
[00:03:38.790]in economics, sociology, animal science,
[00:03:41.772]but we do have fairly strong international experience
[00:03:46.740]among these folks, they've been around.
[00:03:48.480]They've spent anywhere from three or four years,
[00:03:51.450]up to 10 years in other countries,
[00:03:54.270]particularly in the tropics.
[00:03:56.940]So that's kind of a background
[00:03:58.230]on learning in agroecology, if you will.
[00:04:02.580]Here's an outline for what I wanna discuss today.
[00:04:06.240]First, recovering plant breeders biography.
[00:04:09.660]And I say that advisedly,.
[00:04:13.380]Sorry, Blaine,
[00:04:15.360]some of us recover from plant breeding and some don't.
[00:04:17.703]Homi (indistinct) always gives me a bad time
[00:04:20.765]about saying that.
[00:04:22.323]I did spend quite a bit of time in Philippines, Columbia,
[00:04:25.830]and then more recently in Norway
[00:04:27.600]for the last 25 years until COVID struck.
[00:04:30.720]So I haven't been there for the last three,
[00:04:33.000]but I think this has shaped
[00:04:34.320]me a lot,
[00:04:35.730]particularly in teaching.
[00:04:38.490]We'll throw up some definitions and talk about 'em
[00:04:41.520]a little bit and have you discuss definitions,
[00:04:44.520]then we'll talk about this whole idea
[00:04:45.840]of transformational change.
[00:04:48.270]Transformation's the buzz of the day
[00:04:50.760]that everybody talks about not just fine tuning,
[00:04:54.519]but transformationally changing our teaching,
[00:04:57.330]or our research agenda, or whatever.
[00:05:00.300]And we need to think about four kinds of players.
[00:05:04.260]Teachers are up in front most of the time
[00:05:06.840]and organizing things.
[00:05:07.830]Obviously we are important players in the whole process,
[00:05:13.770]but we've been kind of the only players for a long time.
[00:05:17.790]We need to think about students and potential new roles
[00:05:20.970]for students in a more participatory planning environment
[00:05:26.100]and (indistinct) let Brian to
[00:05:27.570]and defend that
[00:05:29.700]also people in the field,
[00:05:31.500]people in farming, obviously,
[00:05:33.420]but also in the food system,
[00:05:35.310]since we define agroecology as the ecology of food systems,
[00:05:39.750]one of many definitions floating around,
[00:05:43.740]we think there are more strengths that these people
[00:05:47.133]that we visited in the field that they could bring
[00:05:50.430]to the table than we currently use them for.
[00:05:55.020]They're mostly seen as objects of observation,
[00:05:58.920]places for students to do interviews,
[00:06:01.320]learn about practical side of farming,
[00:06:03.750]get some farm practice and all these things,
[00:06:05.580]but we've not involved them in the planning
[00:06:08.056]of our courses and materials and the activities.
[00:06:13.260]And how about administrators?
[00:06:16.050]Many of them are accomplished teachers
[00:06:18.180]before they ended up in administration.
[00:06:20.820]So could they have a broader role
[00:06:23.040]in thinking through our course schedules
[00:06:24.960]and bring a broader perspective,
[00:06:27.654]bringing the big picture, if you like.
[00:06:32.910]So then we'll conclude from that.
[00:06:35.880]And my conclusion is that we will all be doing
[00:06:39.300]what agronomy is doing right now,
[00:06:41.370]which is a lot of participatory learning
[00:06:44.700]down the road in the future.
[00:06:45.930]And I think we will be involving these clients
[00:06:49.080]and students more than the planning phases,
[00:06:51.472]because they have a lot to offer.
[00:06:53.850]They're the subject or our
[00:06:57.178]reason we're here.
[00:06:59.640]And I think we could listen to them much more than we do.
[00:07:03.444]And I looked at the agronomy blurb this morning from Fran.
[00:07:09.060]And I don't know if you noticed the blurb there,
[00:07:11.425]it talked about
[00:07:13.650]genetics,
[00:07:14.700]but on Lee (indistinct) it talked about the range course.
[00:07:17.820]It talked about what were the other two.
[00:07:20.190]There were four courses mentioned in there
[00:07:22.283]and all of 'em really emphasized
[00:07:24.510]the whole idea of student learning
[00:07:27.060]rather than teaching presentation stuff.
[00:07:30.841]And I think we're moving that way
[00:07:32.010]and Nebraska's done a pretty good job.
[00:07:36.420]References at the end.
[00:07:38.850]One of the reasons we've been successful in Norway,
[00:07:41.040]in getting positions and in spreading this idea
[00:07:43.800]to other countries as well has been
[00:07:46.020]that we've documented stuff.
[00:07:48.000]We've tried to make ourselves credible within the academy
[00:07:50.730]by publishing, by evaluating, learning,
[00:07:54.030]and putting stuff into journals
[00:07:56.370]and not just the teaching tips in the "NATA Journal,"
[00:07:59.310]but also in mainstream agronomy journal,
[00:08:01.537]"Crop Science" and all the others.
[00:08:04.530]So that's where we're headed
[00:08:06.210]and we can stop and talk about it anytime you want.
[00:08:10.576]So let's move ahead here.
[00:08:15.690]Okay, here's my biography,
[00:08:17.808]a brief one (indistinct) least and been around for a while.
[00:08:21.240]So I have a lot to talk about there,
[00:08:23.460]but we won't spend a lot time being nostalgic,
[00:08:27.570]But one of my first experiential learning experiences
[00:08:30.134]was in California when we built a house.
[00:08:33.750]I was 13 years old. This was my parents' dream house.
[00:08:38.280]They'd been planning this for years.
[00:08:39.810]They finally drafted the final plans.
[00:08:42.030]Got 'em approved, bought a lot,
[00:08:44.400]a couple years before and starting in about February.
[00:08:48.402]My dad talked to the neighbors of this lot and said,
[00:08:52.327]"Hey, I have some time.
[00:08:55.200]Most of my time as a teacher full time,
[00:08:57.090]I'm after hours or early in the morning.
[00:09:00.537]And especially on weekends,
[00:09:01.440]I'm gonna be here and I wanna get your permission
[00:09:04.901]and understanding to start about six o'clock in the morning.
[00:09:07.110]And I'll try to stay away from the skill saws
[00:09:08.970]and stuff,
[00:09:10.992]but let you know that we'll be pounding nails
[00:09:12.510]and stuff early and want you to, you know,
[00:09:15.060]come over and help or feel like you're part of the process."
[00:09:18.540]They all agreed that. What do you say?
[00:09:20.310]You know, somebody comes to you humbly
[00:09:22.080]and asks for your participation,
[00:09:24.180]and they're not gonna say no,
[00:09:26.520]'cause they're gonna be your neighbors in the future too.
[00:09:30.060]But this was really a hands-on process.
[00:09:31.920]And my dad said one thing he'd never built
[00:09:35.306]anything before with new lumber and new nails,
[00:09:40.050]but he did this time.
[00:09:41.340]And my sister went around, picked up all the nails
[00:09:44.190]that these amateur carpenters dropped,
[00:09:47.910]picked up wood chips and all kinds of stuff around.
[00:09:51.270]So it was really a family deal.
[00:09:52.920]So we built this 1,400 square foot house.
[00:09:55.890]We had some of the specialty stuff like electricity
[00:09:58.260]and plumbing and heating system done for us
[00:10:01.890]'cause we didn't feel competent.
[00:10:04.230]I certainly didn't at age 13,
[00:10:07.232]but my dad wanted to spend his time on the carpentry part.
[00:10:11.820]Then of course I grew up in California
[00:10:13.950]and that was in a very high tech, kind of ag
[00:10:16.857]And we sprayed a lot.
[00:10:18.900]I worked for peach growers, grape growers,
[00:10:22.530]and have great memories of this bean sprayer.
[00:10:25.500]That was about 500-gallon tank
[00:10:28.200]with a port on top of it like this.
[00:10:30.600]And I'd fill it from the pump, the well,
[00:10:35.220]and I peered down into that as all
[00:10:37.530]a fumes were coming back up and all this stuff.
[00:10:40.557]And I don't know how I survived,
[00:10:43.160]but my wife says that helps explain a lot of things
[00:10:47.813]like either that or playing football for eight years
[00:10:49.770]and banging my head against other people.
[00:10:52.830]So I was very much a part
[00:10:54.660]of this high tech ag in California,
[00:10:56.850]all the way through Davis and well,
[00:10:58.920]even afterwards at the International Center
[00:11:00.660]down in Columbia.
[00:11:02.640]And I was in the Chemical Corps.
[00:11:05.370]I went through ROTC and had it
[00:11:08.160]all planned for six months active duty.
[00:11:11.242]And I think it was about a week before I had the report,
[00:11:13.170]they said, "Oh, everybody that had a six-month appointment,
[00:11:16.200]they're now in for two years."
[00:11:18.801]So had to give up my assistantship at Davis
[00:11:21.933]and go back to Fort Dietrich and spend a couple of years
[00:11:24.330]with the Army Chemical Corps and we worked on agent orange.
[00:11:27.870]You all know about that.
[00:11:29.820]And I didn't at the time, wish I had,
[00:11:33.930]but we worked on delivery systems and we were looking
[00:11:37.020]at analogs to the two, four, five T two, four D mixture,
[00:11:43.080]chemical analogs with more side groups and stuff.
[00:11:45.930]And we spent all our time in the greenhouse
[00:11:49.320]testing those on woody and herbacious plants,
[00:11:52.980]and then did
[00:11:55.290]flight trials
[00:11:56.123]with C 1 53 hourglass systems down at,
[00:12:03.503]I'd say the name of some of your younger folks
[00:12:06.330]will understand that one day.
[00:12:07.650]Some of the older ones probably remember.
[00:12:09.420]Anyway, it was down in the panhandle of Florida,
[00:12:12.410]doing deposition studies of how the spray
[00:12:15.660]was deposited using OLET paper.
[00:12:18.300]And yeah, had a whole,
[00:12:20.820]actually we had two teams of enlisted men down there.
[00:12:22.980]One was putting out these things before sun-up,
[00:12:26.700]when you have a nice inversion spray
[00:12:29.190]falls on the plants real well.
[00:12:31.410]Then at noon, we had a lab group that took over and we had
[00:12:35.010]three Coleman
[00:12:39.540]machines to measure the color intensity.
[00:12:41.850]And as we washed the spray off the plates,
[00:12:45.780]we put out in the field.
[00:12:46.613]So we had two crews and I was really lucky.
[00:12:49.347]I was a Second Lieutenant. So I got to supervise both crews.
[00:12:52.830]So my days were pretty long.
[00:12:53.918]And that was how we spent our honeymoon too, by the way,
[00:12:58.830]I'll skip the Cornell stuff because it's not quite as
[00:13:01.230]relevant to the topic today.
[00:13:03.120]But we spent two years in the Philippines on a Ford
[00:13:07.620]foundation finance project.
[00:13:10.080]And I was real excited cuz I got to teach plant breeding
[00:13:13.050]when the professor was out of town and worked with folks in
[00:13:17.340]the field,
[00:13:18.173]help plant regional trials with the maze crew all across the
[00:13:21.630]country and collected hats for every market we could find
[00:13:25.133]and had a lot of fun learning Tagalog and learning a new
[00:13:28.530]culture and living overseas for the first time.
[00:13:31.380]And that really shaped my thinking.
[00:13:35.280]And those of you have been overseas and spent time in other
[00:13:37.680]countries,
[00:13:39.034]you know that you come back looking at yourself differently
[00:13:42.360]and looking at your country differently.
[00:13:45.300]When you see it through other people's eyes.
[00:13:48.840]The day I got back to Cornell,
[00:13:50.445]I stopped in to see one of my committee members and he said,
[00:13:54.210]well, do you wanna go to Mexico for your PhD?
[00:13:57.780]I said, well probably let me talk to Barbara
[00:13:59.730]and I'll tell you tomorrow morning, next morning.
[00:14:01.702]I said, yep, we'll go.
[00:14:03.930]Well, we ended up in Columbia instead
[00:14:05.730]with the national mazes program in Medellin, Columbia,
[00:14:09.950]which was a good time to be in Columbia.
[00:14:12.270]Things were fairly calm for a while at that point.
[00:14:15.930]So we finished study on maize adaptation,
[00:14:19.140]across
[00:14:21.660]different altitudes and looked at different photo
[00:14:23.610]periods and that kinda stuff.
[00:14:26.130]Then I went back to Columbia with CIAT for seven years.
[00:14:30.690]I was amazed breeder working on protein,
[00:14:33.030]quality and adaptation of corn as a substation out of summit
[00:14:37.860]in Mexico.
[00:14:39.480]So that's kind of my international early work.
[00:14:45.540]And then it continues.
[00:14:46.410]I've been here 45 years as of last spring and retired and
[00:14:51.240]been in sorghum breeding and millet and cropping systems
[00:14:56.130]agronomist and had various divided appointments.
[00:14:59.400]At one point I was think had a four way appointment and
[00:15:02.550]administration and other stuff.
[00:15:07.050]But the real change for me in teaching came with a talk I
[00:15:11.394]gave in Bellevue Washington in 1993,
[00:15:15.750]that happened,
[00:15:16.583]there were about eight guys there from Sweden and Norway.
[00:15:22.800]And we didn't use the two screens that Terry remembered from
[00:15:27.120]a talk over at Iowa states.
[00:15:28.230]We had three screens and slides and
[00:15:33.090]yeah, all kinds of stuff.
[00:15:35.250]Anyway, they thought after that talk,
[00:15:37.200]they came up and found me and said,
[00:15:38.880]we think you're kind of weird.
[00:15:41.160]I think we could use you in our program.
[00:15:43.710]So that was a good start.
[00:15:46.200]So we went over first time in 1995 and kept going back for
[00:15:50.010]25 years until COVID hit.
[00:15:54.330]We had three PhD courses.
[00:15:56.640]First of all, starting on practices on the farm.
[00:15:59.880]These were all agroecology, one week PhD courses,
[00:16:03.330]which are fairly common in Europe.
[00:16:06.570]Second one was about moving out into the landscape from the,
[00:16:11.818]the farm. The third one was really community level.
[00:16:16.350]So we're looking at the continuum between farm and community
[00:16:18.750]and where food flowed.
[00:16:21.239]So that was the start of our planning for a master's degree
[00:16:25.140]in a agroecology.
[00:16:27.300]And then our first sabbatical in Norway was spent in part
[00:16:31.640]doing a prototype with four students
[00:16:35.130]and we
[00:16:36.390]tested out
[00:16:37.223]some of our ideas and then ran the first course
[00:16:40.020]in the year 2000
[00:16:41.910]with a class of about a dozen or 15, I believe.
[00:16:45.570]And that course has continued every year since then and
[00:16:48.420]continues to attract plenty of students, mostly from the EU,
[00:16:53.580]but also from the U.S. and Canada and some from third world.
[00:16:58.080]So that's where we sort of practiced some of these ideas on
[00:17:02.190]co-learning and learned as we went and experimented tried
[00:17:06.300]things and then also evaluated them and tried to document
[00:17:09.300]'em as best we could and publish them.
[00:17:12.840]As a result of those,
[00:17:13.950]We have eight other programs we have,
[00:17:16.320]they have going in different countries, two in India,
[00:17:19.912]one in Sweden, one in Southern France, one in Italy,
[00:17:24.480]two in Africa, one in Mikkeli university,
[00:17:29.147]if they're able to get going again after, I mean the,
[00:17:31.046]the attacks are still going on from government on the people
[00:17:35.250]up in Mikkeli,
[00:17:37.110]but then another one Uganda that's been quite successful.
[00:17:39.210]And then a new one in Santiago to Chile at the University of
[00:17:43.140]Chile.
[00:17:44.490]So eight programs that are seven of 'em that are really
[00:17:47.460]going right now, either degree or certificate programs.
[00:17:52.740]I've also been involved for well, about 15 years in the
[00:17:57.570]ENOAT, European organic ag and or
[00:18:01.496]agro college teachers group
[00:18:03.930]that meets every year in a different country.
[00:18:06.307]So we've traveled around quite a bit of Europe,
[00:18:08.280]particularly in the Eastern part,
[00:18:10.950]the newly liberated countries after the change from the
[00:18:15.750]Soviet times.
[00:18:17.490]So you get to see a lot of programs here.
[00:18:19.303]A lot of teachers, hear their ideas.
[00:18:22.080]And I think our
[00:18:24.930]just in general,
[00:18:25.830]our program here at Nebraska is pretty good
[00:18:29.610]in terms of participation
[00:18:30.900]and planning and all
[00:18:31.881]and involving a wide
[00:18:33.591]range of players though,
[00:18:34.424]not to the extent of the co-learning
[00:18:37.020]that we're gonna talk about here.
[00:18:40.950]And the further south you go,
[00:18:43.020]the more traditional universities are even within Europe and
[00:18:47.460]particularly in third world, the,
[00:18:49.980]the model is pretty much hierarchical.
[00:18:53.490]Top down.
[00:18:54.660]Professors are revered and separated from students in many
[00:18:58.530]ways, culturally and otherwise we'll talk about that a bit,
[00:19:03.180]but I think one thing that's really sold these programs to
[00:19:06.600]our administrators in Norway particularly has been that
[00:19:10.410]we've published stuff right along.
[00:19:13.260]We haven't let all this teaching time and all these students
[00:19:16.250]interfere with publishing schedules.
[00:19:18.780]So we tried to evaluate,
[00:19:20.100]we've tried to get stuff into journals where people will
[00:19:23.130]read it and try things out.
[00:19:24.746]And that's helped us to,
[00:19:27.320]to get some teaching positions due to some national prizes
[00:19:30.720]we won in Norway.
[00:19:32.653]Okay. So that's where we're going.
[00:19:37.050]Let's see,
[00:19:39.510]hit the right button here.
[00:19:42.300]First of all, about international experience.
[00:19:44.220]I think
[00:19:45.280]for me, at least it changed my outlook in lots of ways.
[00:19:50.820]It taught me a lot about systems
[00:19:54.720]and I'll just say one quick
[00:19:57.718]example, my master's thesis, first planning.
[00:20:01.530]I was thinking genetic resistance to Downey mildew disease,
[00:20:06.000]which is a pathogen that's ubiquitous,
[00:20:08.850]particularly in the wet season.
[00:20:11.370]And I planted a trial, had all the plots lined out.
[00:20:15.960]I knew that we needed spreader rows,
[00:20:17.820]something that was really susceptible every fifth row to
[00:20:21.300]bring in the mildew and propagate it,
[00:20:23.970]then spread it to the other rows. So we had a
[00:20:26.880]spreader row and then four rows of test in-breds
[00:20:29.640]and other test materials.
[00:20:32.370]And we learned a lot from that trial.
[00:20:36.720]One of which was totally unplanned.
[00:20:38.400]But the first thing I learned was we got the trial on the
[00:20:41.220]ground and it was beautiful.
[00:20:43.560]We had all the steaks out there and all the seed was in the
[00:20:46.170]ground. I went back,
[00:20:47.040]eat lunch and we had a rainstorm and I could hear it coming.
[00:20:51.300]We're just pounding on the banana leaves in the small farms
[00:20:54.360]right behind our house.
[00:20:56.430]And I thought, wow, this is great.
[00:20:59.040]Crop's gonna come up. Everything's fine.
[00:21:02.640]So the storm passed over after about, you know,
[00:21:05.940]20 minutes or half hour, I guess.
[00:21:08.564]And it was pretty substantial.
[00:21:09.397]A couple inches in that time as rains are in the rainy
[00:21:13.230]season and the tropics.
[00:21:15.030]So I went back out to see how things look out in the field
[00:21:18.840]and nothing was there.
[00:21:23.130]All the pesticide, thymate we put on with sacks (Incoherent)
[00:21:27.697]at that time
[00:21:28.530]without masks or anything else, we bounced it up and down
[00:21:32.070]the rows of seed.
[00:21:34.950]But the thymate was all gone into the road ditches.
[00:21:37.350]The seed was all gone.
[00:21:38.520]Even the white stakes from the plots were gone.
[00:21:43.140]And I thought back to what I just observed in the small
[00:21:45.660]farm, right behind our house,
[00:21:48.120]everything still looked the same.
[00:21:50.100]It was a multi-layered system.
[00:21:52.293]They had
[00:21:53.820]some big shade trees. They had coconuts,
[00:21:55.770]they had papaya,
[00:21:57.690]they had a lot of low growing shrub crops and coffee.
[00:22:00.510]They had several small crops like beans and
[00:22:04.944]corn and stuff.
[00:22:07.110]And then a,
[00:22:07.943]a layer of litter like that on top of the ground.
[00:22:11.010]And it was all there. Nothing moved, nothing left the field.
[00:22:14.640]So that was my first lesson,
[00:22:17.070]but I didn't put it into action for at least 10 years till
[00:22:21.120]we started setting multiple crops down in Columbia and did a
[00:22:24.570]book on multiple cropping in the mid, mid eighties.
[00:22:28.699]But I was a slow learner.
[00:22:30.420]It took me several decades to really get the message on
[00:22:32.850]these tropical systems.
[00:22:36.030]Okay.
[00:22:38.160]So I've had to experience in teaching in these various
[00:22:40.560]places.
[00:22:41.460]And the questions obviously bring you a lot of insight on
[00:22:44.580]what's going on in a place. What are students interested in?
[00:22:49.784]I think my greatest teaching achievement was starting to
[00:22:51.900]teach in Columbia after about two and a half,
[00:22:55.080]three months there,
[00:22:56.850]the first lecture I wrote in English totally then wrote it
[00:23:00.210]in Spanish,
[00:23:01.530]practiced it four or five times and went to the classroom
[00:23:04.870]and I was teaching for somebody else.
[00:23:06.510]Who'd come back to state for two weeks.
[00:23:09.210]After two weeks, I was able to write a topic outline
[00:23:11.550]in Spanish and just
[00:23:12.480]present from that.
[00:23:14.861]And I could do pretty well in presenting,
[00:23:16.290]but I couldn't understand the questions
[00:23:17.700](chuckling)
[00:23:18.840]at all.
[00:23:20.130]And that's an interesting thing about language in CIAT.
[00:23:22.890]We learned, we had a lot of Brazilian students,
[00:23:26.520]their
[00:23:27.540]agronomist graduates,
[00:23:28.770]and they could understand us in Spanish perfectly.
[00:23:31.950]We could not understand them.
[00:23:34.020]You know, the situation
[00:23:38.547](foreign language)
[00:23:42.000]or if you're in Brazil,
[00:23:42.833]you say the opposite.
[00:23:45.570]Portuguese is really a badly spoken Spanish.
[00:23:47.970]Sorry guys. (laughing)
[00:23:49.830]had to throw that in.
[00:23:51.600]You've heard it before. I'm sure.
[00:23:53.910]Okay.
[00:23:55.050]Also we've given seminars,
[00:23:56.940]workshops stuff in a lot of different countries and learned
[00:24:00.000]about cultures there. And most of those were top down.
[00:24:03.900]One way communication,
[00:24:05.280]as you do at meetings,
[00:24:06.480]that's the way the agronomy society operates.
[00:24:08.820]Poster sessions are better.
[00:24:11.430]Half of our papers are now in poster sessions by design.
[00:24:17.820]The conclusion, this, this is the end endpoint,
[00:24:20.880]really learning activities, messages, methods,
[00:24:23.820]language are all very specific to context specific to the
[00:24:27.900]audience, specific to the topics,
[00:24:30.150]The place where you're presenting the venue, where you are.
[00:24:35.460]And it is pretty much a top down process.
[00:24:38.760]Even when we have projects,
[00:24:41.190]even when we have field activities,
[00:24:43.500]we take a class to visit a farm.
[00:24:45.720]That farmer becomes the teacher in the field.
[00:24:48.270]It's still a top down process.
[00:24:50.880]Granted, there are more questions in the field
[00:24:52.710]there are in the classroom sometimes.
[00:24:54.816]And rarely do we find students, administrators,
[00:24:58.380]and particularly stakeholders shaping the agenda of
[00:25:01.860]education.
[00:25:03.120]And that's what I consider to be co-learning
[00:25:06.150]as we've defined it.
[00:25:07.800]So let's talk about that definition bit.
[00:25:13.350]We published this oh couple of years ago from a meeting in
[00:25:18.480]Chile, which didn't happen because of the riots and students
[00:25:24.300]demonstrating and others.
[00:25:27.900]So anyway, the papers got published at least,
[00:25:31.333]and we got some publicity from it.
[00:25:33.240]But our working definition is that we could talk about
[00:25:36.750]co-learning as building ownership in the learning process
[00:25:39.480]among all the players that are listed up there.
[00:25:44.448]And this comes way back. You know,
[00:25:45.750]John Dewey was one of the first to talk about co-learning in
[00:25:49.260]a way he didn't call it that he an educator,
[00:25:51.826]University of Chicago and a couple of other places.
[00:25:55.530]And Dewey talked about the fact that we learn from things we
[00:25:59.490]already know,
[00:26:00.323]we build on our past experience
[00:26:03.750]and he talked about,
[00:26:05.280]I found this just a couple days ago
[00:26:07.560]in this reference,
[00:26:09.270]he talked about the interrelationship between education
[00:26:11.569]learning in the community and citizenship.
[00:26:15.180]And he maintained that community was essential to,
[00:26:18.960]to the learning process.
[00:26:20.790]And that's the way we feel now about co-learning and why
[00:26:23.070]we've pushed this whole thing.
[00:26:26.070]And it challenges us as teachers. Are we giving up power?
[00:26:30.990]If we get somebody else in on the planning or are we
[00:26:33.540]actually enriching the planning process and the answer's
[00:26:37.110]still out on this,
[00:26:37.943]we still need to talk to a lot of these folks do surveys do
[00:26:42.810]things like you're doing today.
[00:26:48.930]So some definitions that's,
[00:26:50.220]it's closely tied to all these others,
[00:26:52.200]like participatory learning, student driven
[00:26:54.240]learning, community learning a lot of other definitions,
[00:26:58.590]team, group learning and stuff.
[00:27:01.620]But I think we go beyond that when we start involving other
[00:27:04.140]people in the whole planning process.
[00:27:08.340]So let's take about a minute or two and talk to whoever's
[00:27:13.140]close to you. What do you think co-learning is?
[00:27:15.540]How would you define co-learning
[00:27:19.500]learning is not a spectator sport.
[00:27:23.160]So Blane, you gotta talk to the guy at your tail.
[00:27:25.020]Bob, you gotta move over.
[00:27:26.010]Talk to Gary. You're both.
[00:27:27.420]Now you better not. You better talk to Leroy.
[00:27:32.580]What's co-learning anyway. In your mind,
[00:29:03.880]Don't wanna interrupt maybe, but
[00:29:09.027]This is co learning.
[00:29:10.920]Yes.
[00:29:11.788](chuckling)
[00:29:12.621]This is really co-learning.
[00:29:15.180]Not all top down.
[00:29:21.570]We'll see.
[00:29:42.234](foreign language)
[00:29:46.290]So, I can speak Spanish, I just can't
[00:29:48.900]read Spanish.
[00:30:00.173]Between us, we speak English. Our English...
[00:30:05.223]Your English is very good.
[00:30:06.600]Better than my Portugese.
[00:30:08.370]That's just fine with me, it's fine.
[00:30:10.080]Espanol
[00:30:12.450]Oh, okay. So you guys are from Brazil. You're from.
[00:30:14.895]Yeah.
[00:30:16.836]Oh, okay.
[00:30:19.472]When they are speaking...Portuguese
[00:30:22.322]And you're from Argentina too. Oh, OK.
[00:30:25.650]Yeah. But we can understand, but it's been,
[00:30:29.586]so for me,
[00:30:31.892]it's hard since they're Spanish. Yeah.
[00:30:34.767]So from the North, no I'm from the (indistinct).
[00:30:38.910]Yeah. Southeast.
[00:30:40.394]The south people understand really well
[00:30:43.788]Hispanic.
[00:30:44.621]Down south, like Southern Brazil,
[00:30:46.470]They have a lot of similarities.
[00:30:49.260]Argentinian people.
[00:30:50.983]Hmm
[00:30:51.816]But Southeast, not really.
[00:30:53.640]Hmm
[00:30:54.473]We are our way.
[00:30:55.367](Audience chatting)
[00:30:59.436]Our Spanish is not too good, So we have
[00:31:02.490]a very different (indistinct)
[00:31:07.349](Foreign language)
[00:31:12.659](Dr. Francis laughing)
[00:31:15.081](Foreign language)
[00:31:16.950]I know that for example,
[00:31:27.390]At least we're the only country that speaks
[00:31:29.520]Brazilian Portuguese.
[00:31:32.280]Who else could speak Brazilian Portuguese?
[00:31:34.057](Dr. Francis laughing)
[00:31:41.024]So have ever been to Brazil?
[00:31:43.678]One time.
[00:31:44.719]Curitiba.
[00:31:46.052]Oh Curitiba?
[00:31:46.962]Yeah.
[00:31:47.795]Nice.
[00:31:48.628]Good place.
[00:31:49.461]Florianopolis.
[00:31:50.294]Florionopolis. Another good place.
[00:31:51.724]Beautiful.
[00:31:52.620]Yeah.
[00:31:53.453](foreign language)
[00:32:02.863]This is like our state of Argentina that now,
[00:32:05.881]now we have like lots of things going on because
[00:32:09.958](indistinct)
[00:32:14.491]some years ago was like that.
[00:32:17.433]Our Argentinian State to be bothered politically
[00:32:21.076]Brazilians complain about that.
[00:32:22.648]Oh Yeah.
[00:32:23.481]The money that you bring in.
[00:32:49.840]Okay, Let's reconvene here.
[00:33:01.200]One of the big challenges in teaching is
[00:33:03.120]when do you stop a good conversation?
[00:33:04.950]That's going on in the classroom?
[00:33:09.030]Okay.
[00:33:11.940]What's for learning, Bruce?
[00:33:13.890]For you.
[00:33:14.723]It's a fantasy
[00:33:15.556]It's a fantasy.
[00:33:17.010]Yeah, me too.
[00:33:18.840]I think that very often
[00:33:21.180]great to have wonderful theories,
[00:33:22.860]but yeah, it's a fantasy. Okay.
[00:33:26.760]Any other definition,
[00:33:27.832](chuckling)
[00:33:30.660]Andrew, what do you think, come from natural resources?
[00:33:56.700]Yeah. I think we learn all the time.
[00:33:58.920]Right in the classroom. Bob,
[00:34:00.203]what do you learn from your students?
[00:34:32.502]What about our colleagues from Brazil and Argentina?
[00:34:36.870]what's called learning for you?
[00:35:07.920]Example of how hierarchical some systems are.
[00:35:11.588]And one of our ag ecology classes, probably 10 years ago,
[00:35:15.150]or a dozen years ago,
[00:35:18.060]we always had always have reflection sessions and reflection
[00:35:21.240]is a huge part of learning.
[00:35:24.180]And we all reflect all the time about things,
[00:35:26.430]but usually not in a formal way, but over in Norway,
[00:35:29.730]we formalize this and we have reflection at least once a
[00:35:33.420]week, sometimes twice a week in structured sessions.
[00:35:37.555]And this was our final session.
[00:35:39.150]Class was all over all the grades were in,
[00:35:41.580]we had a potluck lunch and we're gonna go around and say,
[00:35:45.600]okay, you know, what,
[00:35:46.433]what did you learn that was useful from this whole course?
[00:35:49.470]And then we'll have another round where you say,
[00:35:51.900]how could we improve the course?
[00:35:54.327]And this guy up in the corner, jumped up,
[00:35:56.010]fella from Italy and said, wait, wait, wait,
[00:35:58.350]I have to tell you something.
[00:36:00.360]He said,
[00:36:01.859]I've been in the university for whatever it was 18 or 20 or
[00:36:04.350]22 years.
[00:36:06.360]This is the first time anybody has ever asked me
[00:36:09.300]what I thought
[00:36:11.550]about the learning
[00:36:13.230]environment
[00:36:14.190]about
[00:36:15.150]teaching.
[00:36:16.410]And I mean,
[00:36:17.243]you wanted to weep and also celebrate the moment because it
[00:36:21.480]just talks about how hierarchical a lot of systems are in
[00:36:24.510]the world still very much so.
[00:36:28.380]Okay.
[00:36:30.360]We'll go ahead. Without defining.
[00:36:34.050]Co-learning very,
[00:36:38.190]some of the foundations,
[00:36:39.180]I think if we're gonna change something,
[00:36:42.090]we have to carefully analyze what we're doing now. Right?
[00:36:46.500]Is it working well reasonably? Well,
[00:36:49.290]I think our systems are pretty good.
[00:36:51.814]And particularly in Nebraska,
[00:36:52.920]we are evolving toward more hands on
[00:36:56.526]non top down stuff.
[00:37:00.240]I think. Did the Gooding who died last week?
[00:37:02.940]Was he the son of Gooding? Who was the head of the,
[00:37:06.960]the teaching center's name for? I'm not sure.
[00:37:11.850]Anyway, I think it's the one who was here.
[00:37:14.550]He came into the classroom one day just to look at things
[00:37:18.024]and center had been named for his dad.
[00:37:20.820]And he looked around at, it was over in two 80 a I guess,
[00:37:25.950]or B whichever it is the one on the, the east side anyway,
[00:37:30.480]crops one. And all the students were at tables.
[00:37:34.677]And along with teaching assistant,
[00:37:35.760]I was wandering around talking to him.
[00:37:37.260]I went up talking to people, oh, what are they doing?
[00:37:40.530]Well, they're learning,
[00:37:41.363]they're having project activities and discussing stuff.
[00:37:43.710]And well, where does the professor stand?
[00:37:48.150]Well,
[00:37:49.980]he stands here or visits groups
[00:37:52.620]or, you know,
[00:37:53.453]answers, questions and stuff, and that a real
[00:37:55.980]revelation for him.
[00:37:58.652]And I think it's an innovation to have all three of those
[00:38:01.500]rooms with tables,
[00:38:02.520]where we have people sitting around tables rather than in a
[00:38:06.480]classroom formal situation like we have here, in fact.
[00:38:11.940]So are there things we need to change?
[00:38:13.860]Is this really a problem or not?
[00:38:17.400]I think that's still still an open question for me at least,
[00:38:21.360]but I think there are nothing controversial about the
[00:38:24.450]learning from the web and the information resources that are
[00:38:28.320]out there and hard as it is for us to admit we are not the
[00:38:32.198]only, or the best source of information anymore,
[00:38:36.690]because there's so much out there so much that's available
[00:38:40.080]that we need to think of our,
[00:38:41.430]about our own roles in this whole process of learning.
[00:38:46.166]And for me, I think our process,
[00:38:47.970]we become learning catalysts and not purveyors of the latest
[00:38:52.784]or the best information necessarily students can get that so
[00:38:56.760]easily on the web they're ahead of us often.
[00:39:01.470]But what I think we have to offer perhaps is insight
[00:39:04.860]perspective, how systems work, what the larger issues are,
[00:39:11.220]and especially how do you sort out information?
[00:39:14.520]I think that's our biggest challenge right now really is
[00:39:16.740]what do you do with all this stuff?
[00:39:18.690]How do you decide what's real?
[00:39:20.910]What can I use?
[00:39:22.380]Do I trust the source?
[00:39:24.390]Or is this somebody just blowing steam?
[00:39:27.900]So I'm,
[00:39:28.733]I'm convinced that we have to respect that respect the web
[00:39:33.960]students are a little extreme on this.
[00:39:36.120]When I start assigning readings from the library or book
[00:39:39.330]reviews to, you know, come on, Chuck,
[00:39:44.310]it's not on the web,
[00:39:45.210]it doesn't exist.
[00:39:47.970]Well
[00:39:49.290]for them, it doesn't exist.
[00:39:50.520]I guess if they don't go to the library.
[00:39:52.858]And I ask two students over here on the reference desk and C
[00:39:55.650]T one day,
[00:39:57.120]how many students have checked out these five books that I
[00:40:00.660]have on reserve over here. And they looked at each other.
[00:40:04.989]And what year are you? One of 'em was a sophomore.
[00:40:07.230]One was a senior.
[00:40:08.520]Do you use references from your own system here? Well, no,
[00:40:12.450]we go to the web.
[00:40:13.890]So, I mean, that was lesson for me,
[00:40:16.800]but I kept putting books on reserve anyway,
[00:40:18.450]just out of custom.
[00:40:20.400]So they wouldn't have to buy books anyway,
[00:40:23.970]the environment's changed. We all know that.
[00:40:29.700]So what's gonna happen if students really embrace this,
[00:40:34.890]they're already,
[00:40:35.790]I think participating an awful lot more than I did as an
[00:40:38.520]undergraduate in the dialogue in the classroom with more
[00:40:41.940]questions, more practical stuff,
[00:40:44.520]but they're no longer gonna be evaluated by the ability to
[00:40:48.840]memorize facts and bar from back on an exam at the end of
[00:40:53.037]the semester.
[00:40:54.690]So that'll be part of our system for a long time. I'm sure.
[00:40:57.946]And hopefully we can ask the kinds of questions that cause
[00:41:00.240]people to think,
[00:41:01.500]not just vomit back stuff that we've told them or that they
[00:41:05.100]read somewhere.
[00:41:07.800]So I think that the transformation will be from that.
[00:41:11.520]And I'm setting up a, a straw person here in a way,
[00:41:15.360]because we're already doing a good part of this,
[00:41:18.630]but we're transitioning to a situation where students are
[00:41:21.480]active learners who do participate in the design.
[00:41:25.890]And I think when people participate in the design of
[00:41:29.100]something, they, they feel ownership.
[00:41:31.500]They have more chance to say what their past experience is.
[00:41:35.190]And here's the way I learn.
[00:41:37.980]Here's the way I, I absorb information,
[00:41:40.260]put it together and how we can,
[00:41:43.107]how we can put this into the future and tackle questions
[00:41:47.700]that have not been asked yet. Questions that we don't even
[00:41:50.940]know.
[00:41:52.770]You need an ability to, to sort things out.
[00:41:57.330]And you may find the answers in past experiences.
[00:41:59.970]You may not, you may have to invent some new ones.
[00:42:05.340]Here's some of the kinds of challenges.
[00:42:06.780]I present this to our students as part of their preparation
[00:42:10.140]for projects and projects, by the way, are good activity.
[00:42:13.710]As you all know, they're, they're complicated.
[00:42:18.090]I used to let people choose their own topics.
[00:42:21.210]I think one year we actually had people choose their own
[00:42:23.220]teams. And I think they lost a little bit of the learning
[00:42:26.790]experience there because in the future they're gonna be
[00:42:29.580]working on jobs where they don't pick their own teams.
[00:42:31.770]For sure.
[00:42:32.790]They've gotta learn to adapt and find ways to rationalize
[00:42:36.990]differences and discuss things and come up with answers
[00:42:39.750]rather than being assigned exactly what you're gonna do.
[00:42:43.574]But I think these are some of the things that I,
[00:42:45.543]I pose to the students.
[00:42:48.570]Certainly the systems approach is all about agrocology
[00:42:52.230]or vice versa.
[00:42:54.480]What kind of thinking do we need to deal with future
[00:42:57.000]systems? Do we need broader background, broader preparation?
[00:43:03.210]Hopefully we establish a culture of curiosity around
[00:43:06.660]designing systems for the future.
[00:43:12.520]What do we do as resources become scarce?
[00:43:16.110]What do we do when the sea level rises a foot or more
[00:43:21.150]maybe as a meter when the Greenland ice cap is all gone?
[00:43:25.950]Was it a meter or is it a foot? It's a lot.
[00:43:28.680]There's a lot of ice down there, up there.
[00:43:31.680]Yeah.
[00:43:32.513]That's relative of course our son had a thing about maps.
[00:43:35.970]He put all the maps on the wall upside down
[00:43:40.080]when he was teaching and stuff,
[00:43:41.820]just to get people to think about it.
[00:43:44.427]And why do we have maps right side of, oh anyway.
[00:43:49.080]So do we keep fine tuning a system that may or may not be
[00:43:52.620]working or do we look for new learning approaches,
[00:43:55.650]new systems?
[00:43:57.990]And we have to bring in equity of access.
[00:44:02.430]We've got a situation in this country.
[00:44:03.900]That's totally unsustainable in terms of resources, wealth.
[00:44:09.900]And if you look at the long poll, you know, no,
[00:44:12.345]no culture has ever survived.
[00:44:14.400]That had the kind of differences that we have
[00:44:16.276]even right now,
[00:44:19.530]hungry people are desperate people and they'll,
[00:44:23.100]they'll come after the resources wherever they can find
[00:44:25.860]them.
[00:44:26.693]And we have to take that into account. So equity is not,
[00:44:30.030]not just an academic topic or something.
[00:44:32.130]We write into our syllabus.
[00:44:34.350]It's real, in my opinion,
[00:44:38.100]Access to land is a big deal.
[00:44:40.380]Andrew and I were talking about,
[00:44:41.330]of course we have called the urbanization of rural
[00:44:44.700]landscapes,
[00:44:45.533]which talks about transformation of farm land into other
[00:44:48.720]uses higher value uses in fact, in our current
[00:44:53.730]economy.
[00:44:56.957]So he was talking about places out sand Hills and elsewhere
[00:45:00.330]where people build up on top of the Hills, have a good view.
[00:45:03.300]And you know, people swallow up land because it's,
[00:45:06.811]it's just land waiting for development. Right?
[00:45:11.040]Well, yes and no,
[00:45:13.200]if you're an economist and look at short term economics.
[00:45:16.110]Sure.
[00:45:17.430]But in the long term, man, we need that land for food,
[00:45:21.570]which is one of the things we talked about this afternoon
[00:45:23.940]with USDA folks.
[00:45:25.800]Our long term trial up in Mead will be transitioned probably
[00:45:28.800]into a joint collaborative activity with USDA
[00:45:33.840]to be able to keep it going.
[00:45:35.610]And one of the things we did three years ago is change all
[00:45:38.580]the crops, hybrids, and varieties to food grade crops,
[00:45:41.627]because we think that's more important in fact,
[00:45:45.060]than making ethanol,
[00:45:48.150]dumping this into feed, lots,
[00:45:49.410]making plastic pellets and all kinds of stuff in the long
[00:45:52.200]term. Okay.
[00:45:53.670]You make money today in today's economy,
[00:45:56.520]but we've gotta think about the long term.
[00:45:59.910]So how do we prepare students for a complex uncertain
[00:46:02.610]future? I think that's a, that's a huge issue,
[00:46:06.030]training and education.
[00:46:09.150]I often ask people who come and apply for jobs here.
[00:46:11.550]How do you distinguish between training and education?
[00:46:15.870]Both are important.
[00:46:16.710]You need to know how to do soil tests and interpret data and
[00:46:20.010]stuff, but also you need to be educated.
[00:46:25.350]And then something that comes from Thomas Kuhn, I think,
[00:46:29.850]I don't know if he actually used the term paradigm paralysis
[00:46:32.370]or if it was Joel Barker in his books, Joel barker,
[00:46:35.310]as one of his disciples who was popularized this work of
[00:46:39.240]Thomas Kuhn, the structure scientific revolutions,
[00:46:43.110]that's called a terminal disease of certainty.
[00:46:48.570]I've thought about a lot.
[00:46:51.300]I don't wanna go there or be there.
[00:46:55.320]Okay. What, what are students gonna,
[00:46:57.900]how are they gonna really contribute to planning? Well,
[00:47:01.710]we need the space for that.
[00:47:03.600]Is this something students are really interested in or do
[00:47:06.930]they depend on us as teachers after all? Come on.
[00:47:10.410]You're the one with the experience Bruce,
[00:47:11.880]you've dealt with pastures your whole career.
[00:47:14.602]Why shouldn't, you know, the best things for us to learn?
[00:47:17.796]I went to medical school, I never had a course in ecology
[00:47:22.102]I never had a course in ecology either.
[00:47:25.470]So we're very lucky.
[00:47:28.629]We, we finally have a legitimate aggricologist
[00:47:30.990]who's gonna teach agricology ecology Carlina Carlo from
[00:47:35.280]Ecuador is here with us. Now,
[00:47:39.270]Does this move students outta their comfort zones? Sure.
[00:47:42.810]I mean,
[00:47:43.890]if you're used to being a passive observer writer of notes,
[00:47:48.240]memorizer of stuff. Yeah.
[00:47:50.310]It's gonna be uncomfortable when somebody says, Hey,
[00:47:52.980]what do you think we ought to be doing in this class? Well,
[00:47:54.947]that raises you to another level to think about that course
[00:47:59.148]in a very different way than, oh, well,
[00:48:02.160]here it is cut and dried.
[00:48:03.330]I can read the text and read my notes and pass the exam and
[00:48:06.690]all that.
[00:48:07.716]What's gonna be the outcome. What, what,
[00:48:11.580]what is the objective of doing that perhaps
[00:48:17.670]same objective as students have?
[00:48:19.560]I think we don't even..
[00:48:20.762]Which I think is training.
[00:48:26.750]training is the word.
[00:48:29.040]Well, it depends again.
[00:48:31.860]Yeah, but I think that's a key question, Bruce.
[00:48:34.830]If we give people too many things that they're not
[00:48:36.750]interested in, we've lost them,
[00:48:40.530]but I think the co-learning thing does get people more
[00:48:42.990]involved in setting the agenda.
[00:48:45.240]It, it raises their perspective a bit to look at the big
[00:48:48.750]picture. What do I need to learn to get a job?
[00:48:52.380]Not just the first job, but four jobs or five,
[00:48:56.130]which is the average. I think nowadays.
[00:48:58.350]The risk of that,
[00:48:59.350]they're getting to a narrow perspective saying I wanna do
[00:49:03.654]this have, and
[00:49:08.790]that was no longer a viable type lifestyle
[00:49:13.769]may not have the background to adapt.
[00:49:15.560][Dr. Francis] What do you do?
[00:49:17.460]That's that's the whole thesis right there. What do you do?
[00:49:20.760]I wanted to grow goats.
[00:49:21.900]I was growing up that thought cute and you know, friendly.
[00:49:24.870]And I really liked them for some reason. Well,
[00:49:26.940]I never grew goats,
[00:49:29.520]But I had a chance to grow rice after I got my PhD.
[00:49:32.970]My one of my mom's high, huh? Yes.
[00:49:38.580]Chance. I mean,
[00:49:39.930]there were these two guys who had no kids living in
[00:49:42.390]Woodland, California, good buddies of my uncle,
[00:49:45.660]one of 'em was a boyfriend of my mom in high school.
[00:49:48.068]They said, Hey, why don't you come work for us?
[00:49:50.400]You know, you could do a lot of stuff here.
[00:49:51.900]You can work into management and ownership eventually.
[00:49:54.840]And they had like 1600 acres of rice and several combines
[00:49:58.770]and all around the Sacramento airport. And so, well,
[00:50:01.800]I already took this job down in Columbia.
[00:50:03.170]And then I go down and try that for a while.
[00:50:07.140]But yeah.
[00:50:08.250]Are we preparing students for the kind of future you
[00:50:11.220]described?
[00:50:12.420]I don't know.
[00:50:13.740]I hope so.
[00:50:15.510]I hope we're giving them open-ended perspectives.
[00:50:18.720]That'll help them transition, you know, as things change.
[00:50:24.870]So yeah.
[00:50:25.703]What about this group planning?
[00:50:26.790]Is this gonna bring in food systems more heavily than we
[00:50:30.390]do now in, in conventional agronomy.
[00:50:34.170]And I think in partial answer to your question,
[00:50:37.500]I think this is gonna increase the incentives for learning.
[00:50:41.940]We've seen that in Norway and we've transitioned our own
[00:50:44.760]courses.
[00:50:45.930]We started out very much on farming systems,
[00:50:48.630]cropping systems, crop animal systems,
[00:50:52.950]and all the complexities of those.
[00:50:54.420]But we've seen our students coming into the course and maybe
[00:50:57.150]this is self selection, by the way we advertise,
[00:50:59.430]but we've got a lot more people interested in farming as a
[00:51:04.350]human activity system.
[00:51:06.330]And we've seen students coming in asking questions about
[00:51:08.820]land use.
[00:51:11.160]I just read a thesis the other day about flooding up on the
[00:51:14.550]border, British Columbia and Washington state,
[00:51:17.610]which is a multi stakeholder thing that tribes are involved,
[00:51:21.300]fishing rights, farming developers,
[00:51:26.340]and they're finding ways to resolve this.
[00:51:27.930]And she was studying this process of land use decisions.
[00:51:32.040]So that's a long ways from what I thought agri ecology was
[00:51:34.710]when I started teaching it.
[00:51:36.630]But we had many more students doing these kinds of thesis
[00:51:40.530]projects by their own choice about more of the social issues
[00:51:45.030]and the yeah. Farmer group issues,
[00:51:48.570]particularly students from France,
[00:51:50.310]where they have a lot of farmer organizations.
[00:51:53.070]Many of them have interned with an organization and we had
[00:51:57.090]one just the other day, Wednesday,
[00:51:59.400]I guess it was a final exam of a exam in France.
[00:52:05.850]Then will our students in fact go out and become proponents
[00:52:10.950]of this whole idea and push this on professors.
[00:52:14.501]And we've had students tell us this already.
[00:52:17.070]I'm worried after this semester in Norway,
[00:52:19.560]when I go back to the normal courses,
[00:52:23.160]am I gonna be real antagonistic toward professors who set
[00:52:27.810]down all the rules and all this stuff?
[00:52:30.450]How am I gonna deal with this?
[00:52:31.380]I said, well, figure it out.
[00:52:33.600]You know, put your ideas fourth, see if your ideas float,
[00:52:38.940]they hammer you down, you know,
[00:52:40.620]come up over here somewhere else. And,
[00:52:43.230]but don't forget the things you learned in this first
[00:52:45.300]semester, agriecology courses.
[00:52:48.270]So, but we need to know this.
[00:52:50.100]We need to survey students. And I wrote a,
[00:52:52.873]a Fulbright proposal.
[00:52:54.360]Wasn't funded to go to Carolina and to Santiago to do this,
[00:52:58.470]but find some other funds for it. Somehow.
[00:53:02.940]Now how about farmers? People we visit in the field.
[00:53:06.330]They've certainly got a lot to say about this and they do
[00:53:08.820]when you ask them about farming,
[00:53:11.040]But we have not really asked them about the whole teaching
[00:53:13.770]agenda.
[00:53:16.770]Most of them now are college grads.
[00:53:19.350]They've been through the program a lot of in fairly
[00:53:22.800]specialized discipline, specific departments.
[00:53:26.109]What do they think about that education?
[00:53:28.620]How do they apply that to their, their current life work,
[00:53:31.560]Their farming activity?
[00:53:33.360]How do they make these transitions to some other job?
[00:53:37.680]If you have a farm crisis and you lose the farm,
[00:53:41.070]what do you do?
[00:53:42.570]I mean, farmers underestimate
[00:53:46.350]their skills.
[00:53:47.610]I think.
[00:53:48.600]when you hear someone say, oh, all I know how to do is farm.
[00:53:53.220]I think my God, you have so many skills.
[00:53:56.070]You know, so many things.
[00:53:57.840]I mean, you're a mechanic, you're an economist,
[00:53:59.940]you're a long term planner.
[00:54:02.820]And this is what people do.
[00:54:04.020]Of course is go to work for industry or go to work,
[00:54:05.916]selling seed or fertilizer or other things. They,
[00:54:08.253]they stay in industry, stay in ag, but maybe not as,
[00:54:12.330]as farm owners.
[00:54:15.150]And that's what this course on urbanization or rural
[00:54:18.000]landscape is all about. Andrew.
[00:54:20.517]It's about finding alternatives. It's really, of course,
[00:54:22.950]about sprawl. And I think it ought to continue.
[00:54:25.590]Somehow.
[00:54:26.423]We need to raise the consciousness about the long term
[00:54:29.220]effects of what goes on right now.
[00:54:32.944]So bottom line is we really haven't seen these people in the
[00:54:35.370]field food system,
[00:54:36.750]people or farmers as resource people
[00:54:40.830]beyond explaining their
[00:54:42.150]systems beyond talking about the farming part of things or
[00:54:46.920]the food system, the nutrition part.
[00:54:48.720]If they're in the community food system,
[00:54:50.938]what do they think we should be doing in the university?
[00:54:55.080]Now we do listening tours.
[00:54:57.205]Whenever there's a new vice chancellor or new anybody,
[00:55:01.008]they take a listening tour around the state and listen to
[00:55:04.427]clients everywhere and they come back with some ideas.
[00:55:08.850]I think they come back with some very good ideas.
[00:55:11.400]They come back knowing more about Nebraska and our
[00:55:13.620]clientele.
[00:55:15.828]I'm not sure they hear about long term concerns.
[00:55:20.850]I think they hear more about immediate concerns and that's
[00:55:24.044]obviously farmers have to stay in business.
[00:55:26.580]So they've gotta be concerned with the short term,
[00:55:30.390]but I wish our administrators,
[00:55:32.910]all of them would follow the guide of somebody among our own
[00:55:37.350]cadre of administrators who says,
[00:55:39.540]ideally I should spend half my time thinking
[00:55:44.340]about the future and long term direction of our department,
[00:55:48.210]but I don't have time.
[00:55:50.385]I'm so busy going to meetings and zooming and all this that
[00:55:54.390]I'm not afforded the time or I don't take the time to,
[00:55:57.300]to spend it doing long term planning.
[00:56:02.370]I think farmers in the field could help us in designing our
[00:56:05.550]own teaching agenda because they're the ones who are
[00:56:07.950]applying it. They're the ones doing the stuff,
[00:56:12.240]ask them, you know,
[00:56:13.140]here's what I learned when I was in the university.
[00:56:15.660]Here's what I didn't learn that I could have learned.
[00:56:18.900]And I've, it's taken me years to, to catch up, you know,
[00:56:21.330]think about some of these broader issues.
[00:56:25.650]So I dunno if we can sell this to
[00:56:28.383]that brings up another
[00:56:29.430]thing. Language is important.
[00:56:31.350]We're just talking about language Spanish versus Portuguese
[00:56:34.140]back here.
[00:56:35.656](foreign language)
[00:56:38.400]The control dropped itself.
[00:56:40.710]I have no responsibility.
[00:56:43.193](foreign language)
[00:56:47.370]And that's one of the reasons we came back from Columbia
[00:56:49.350]because our kids started displaying that behavior about
[00:56:53.141]responsibility. And we thought, well,
[00:56:55.239]I think our kids ought,
[00:56:56.550]grew up in our own culture and learn about responsibility a
[00:57:00.720]little more. And it's embedded in the culture.
[00:57:03.630]If you can maintain your life, leave it AA.
[00:57:07.332](foreign language)
[00:57:08.880]You're successful, right?
[00:57:11.550]In your mind at least.
[00:57:13.140]But man, we all make mistakes.
[00:57:15.240]That's the way we learn.
[00:57:17.340]Okay. Enough said about farmer clients, clientele
[00:57:23.820]now one of the, some of the negative, well this,
[00:57:26.820]this gonna take more time.
[00:57:29.400]How are we gonna involve farmers? If,
[00:57:31.230]I mean they're full time farmers.
[00:57:34.320]We pay the farmers.
[00:57:35.370]We visit here in Nebraska at still $200 a day,
[00:57:39.870]a visit that's kind of based on the Sarah rules.
[00:57:44.790]Normally we don't pay the farmers,
[00:57:46.020]anything for the teams that come out and visit them for
[00:57:49.050]about three days.
[00:57:50.730]Now they're not with those people all the time,
[00:57:52.152]but they work on the farm under supervision,
[00:57:55.846]work with the farm crew. Whoever's there,
[00:58:00.060]but this would be a major change.
[00:58:02.070]And we have to figure out a way to compensate farmers for
[00:58:04.170]their time, in my opinion,
[00:58:08.513]how, how importantly, well,
[00:58:10.290]people take this responsibility.
[00:58:12.780]Do they really see this as something they ought to be doing?
[00:58:15.000]Or, you know, I'm just a farmer.
[00:58:18.150]I wanna teach kids about farming when they come out here.
[00:58:21.060]I don't want 'em to be burdened by all these huge things
[00:58:25.235]like farm taxes that are so different between Kansas and
[00:58:27.390]Nebraska.
[00:58:28.825]And although you hear plenty of that from farmers too.
[00:58:33.810]Yeah.
[00:58:34.643]Will I see this as being a real contribution to education?
[00:58:37.590]An obligation? Almost.
[00:58:41.070]What about administrators?
[00:58:43.920]There are some in here.
[00:58:44.820]I know I've been one who've been there.
[00:58:49.230]Many of 'em are teachers, particularly Martha, Tiffany.
[00:58:52.980]I don't really know the backgrounds and some of the others,
[00:58:55.290]but they've all had teaching experience one point or
[00:58:59.130]another.
[00:59:00.480]Are they interested in being back in the classroom?
[00:59:03.510]We did this last spring in agricology.
[00:59:05.430]We had visitors come in one every week on Wednesday.
[00:59:08.400]Well that's one third of the classroom time was spent with
[00:59:11.627]visitors coming in.
[00:59:14.490]Sabrina was there.
[00:59:15.330]I don't think anybody else here was there. Yeah.
[00:59:17.640]Bob was there too. And these were fascinating discussions.
[00:59:22.650]We got it from A R D who had a workshop in
[00:59:26.670]December last year on soil health.
[00:59:29.940]And they had a panel of students,
[00:59:31.920]grad students of farmers and of young faculty members.
[00:59:36.240]And they kind of told their stories.
[00:59:37.680]It was kind of a career orientation session.
[00:59:42.690]And I happened to be sitting at a table with Tiffany,
[00:59:45.518]the Dean of Kasner.
[00:59:47.100]say, Tiffany, we ought do this in the classroom too.
[00:59:49.230]Don't you think?
[00:59:50.604]I said, sure.
[00:59:51.437]I'll come.
[00:59:52.590]So she was committed. We had our time scheduling later,
[00:59:55.920]but we ended up having Martha and Tiffany and Bob and
[01:00:01.170]Sabrina and a bunch of other people.
[01:00:02.482]And Gary came in at the last minute to substitute for
[01:00:06.180]somebody who backed out.
[01:00:08.070]You remember that, Gary?
[01:00:09.810]How was the discussion? Was it pretty good you think?
[01:00:13.770]Even though we had too many people online
[01:00:15.450]and not enough in the classroom,
[01:00:17.040]that's a, a COVID related reality.
[01:00:21.900]Now could administrators adapt to a class in soils or
[01:00:26.951]agricology to bring in big picture questions,
[01:00:29.820]long term kinds of questions.
[01:00:33.090]Are they worried,
[01:00:33.923]willing to talk about university policies and politics?
[01:00:38.370]And for those of your grad students,
[01:00:39.960]there is politics in the university here, believe it or not,
[01:00:44.490]will I bring this future perspective?
[01:00:45.961]Will they bring something about preparing for the other jobs
[01:00:51.616]that are gonna take place of the one that disappears?
[01:00:55.679]And I think if teachers come to the classroom,
[01:00:58.500]this was our experience in Norway.
[01:01:00.420]Twice we've had department heads come to our three day field
[01:01:05.070]experience, living on a biodynamic dairy farm
[01:01:07.417]and going out interviews with farmers.
[01:01:10.950]And it made a real difference to their understanding of our
[01:01:13.170]program there, why we needed money for travel,
[01:01:16.980]why we needed money to get students out in the field.
[01:01:21.960]So it it's helped us and helped us get positions over in
[01:01:24.900]Norway, at least.
[01:01:28.050]What about us? We're the ones that have to make this change.
[01:01:30.810]We as teachers, your students can do stuff too.
[01:01:33.420]You can catalyze this change,
[01:01:36.600]but it's gonna be teachers who make the change.
[01:01:39.000]And are we willing to do this perceived giving up of some
[01:01:43.770]power to other players in the system,
[01:01:47.520]sharing that power for planning?
[01:01:50.010]I mean, ultimately we're responsible.
[01:01:51.990]We invite another teacher to come in another professor to
[01:01:56.100]come into the classroom.
[01:01:56.970]We're still responsible for that class and what the students
[01:02:01.050]do and what we do with the information.
[01:02:03.480]But do people see this as a delusion of their status or
[01:02:07.680]power?
[01:02:08.850]I don't know. They may,
[01:02:10.860]I think I would have 20 or 30 years ago.
[01:02:13.613]I don't say it the same way.
[01:02:16.560]Is this really gonna take advantage of the I.T. environment?
[01:02:21.450]Do we become more than Sage on the stage and become a guide
[01:02:24.840]on the side, more learning catalyst than the,
[01:02:28.257]the source of the best information.
[01:02:33.030]And then are we educating you,
[01:02:36.960]new teachers to be,
[01:02:39.570]catalysts?
[01:02:40.590]To be learning leaders
[01:02:42.570]rather than being the absolute
[01:02:44.160]experts in your field?
[01:02:45.210]And of course we expect both this stage of the game.
[01:02:49.860]Yeah. So it's a new role for teachers.
[01:02:51.810]I think.
[01:02:54.390]Well, here's what I think we need to do.
[01:02:56.700]We need more information.
[01:02:58.050]That's what I proposed in the Fulbright that wasn't funded.
[01:03:01.170]We need to talk to people in these other countries where we
[01:03:03.570]have programs now going on where culture is very different,
[01:03:07.440]academic culture, certainly status of teachers is different.
[01:03:11.640]Everything's different.
[01:03:14.040]So what is, what is uniform?
[01:03:16.110]What is unique and what is
[01:03:19.470]transferable?
[01:03:21.240]And I think asking the right questions,
[01:03:24.570]participatory learning,
[01:03:25.590]I think the co-learning idea is
[01:03:26.940]something that's transferable.
[01:03:28.860]Although it'll be a long term iterative process won't happen
[01:03:31.770]all at once.
[01:03:34.770]I think we're gonna find out that learning is very context
[01:03:38.610]specific. And we certainly know that in farming,
[01:03:42.270]if you're selling fertilizer seed,
[01:03:43.890]you want to sell that killer hybrid to as many farmers as
[01:03:47.190]you can.
[01:03:49.830]But ultimately, you know,
[01:03:51.930]should we be looking at hybrids that are unique to each
[01:03:54.210]niche, even each field.
[01:03:57.000]And we did this in a sorghum workshop down in,
[01:04:00.527]I forget where it was with Paul Hay. One time 25 years ago,
[01:04:07.050]we were asking farmers if they made different planning
[01:04:09.390]decisions for different fields,
[01:04:11.700]based on past experience in those field yield potential,
[01:04:15.390]they use different populations, different hybrids or not.
[01:04:18.360]So they filled out a survey at the start of the workshop.
[01:04:22.560]And then we
[01:04:24.360]actually, Paul took on the introductory stuff
[01:04:26.127]and I went back to the
[01:04:27.270]room and went through these real quick.
[01:04:29.340]So as we went through the agenda, we asked farmers,
[01:04:31.410]we called on them to answer the questions.
[01:04:34.230]It's one of the best workshops that we've had with farmers.
[01:04:38.160]And that's what Paul said.
[01:04:40.167]At least he got good feedback on it.
[01:04:43.620]We actually involved them and co-learning in a lot of ways.
[01:04:47.400]It was such a good model.
[01:04:48.510]And I don't think we've tried it since then.
[01:04:50.970]Like a lot of things we try and abandoned.
[01:04:55.410]So I think we're gonna get a lot of opinions.
[01:04:57.180]I think the north south divide is, is a rather big one.
[01:05:01.980]There'll be a lot of opinions.
[01:05:04.290]I think transformative change is a slow process.
[01:05:08.790]It's not something that happens overnight.
[01:05:12.210]A lot of people are resistant to change, believe it or not.
[01:05:17.820]And with good, good reason, farmers are resistant to change.
[01:05:23.220]If they're successful in what they're doing,
[01:05:26.100]making some money at least,
[01:05:27.544]or at least keeping their heads above water,
[01:05:31.080]that could be called success.
[01:05:33.120]Now prices are high for a lot of reasons.
[01:05:35.280]Right now that's a short term thing.
[01:05:38.400]Hopefully people are investing in the,
[01:05:41.040]some CDs or something other than the neighbor's land or
[01:05:46.650]maybe some on-farm storage would be useful,
[01:05:48.570]but putting some money away for times that'll come that are
[01:05:51.870]not as good as the prices right now,
[01:05:55.260]but these are things we need to talk about in the classroom
[01:05:57.630]beyond just the,
[01:05:59.910]the facts.
[01:06:00.800]In my opinion.
[01:06:04.950]One thing I'd say about publishing too,
[01:06:07.380]publish or parish is the, the mantra and the university.
[01:06:10.980]Of course, we all know, and it's true.
[01:06:15.870]And it's particularly true for those who have a large
[01:06:18.693]research component in their position.
[01:06:22.319]But we found that
[01:06:25.080]in Norway, at least
[01:06:27.030]we've gotten a position from the Dean for a person
[01:06:31.118]who was on a temporary situation, just because he said, Hey,
[01:06:35.310]you guys are attracting and you're one little agricology
[01:06:38.850]program with two professors there you're attracting as many
[01:06:42.750]students as the whole rest of the plant science department.
[01:06:47.040]You need to have these both permanent positions. So he,
[01:06:49.820]he gave us a position for the second professor.
[01:06:54.990]Another two more positions we got from these prizes.
[01:06:58.830]We got for teaching methods.
[01:07:01.350]And it's kind of funny.
[01:07:03.840]One was this medical anthropologist who we hired as postdoc.
[01:07:07.950]And she was there for three years plus,
[01:07:10.140]and she went in to talked to the department head and he
[01:07:12.000]said, I've gotta hire you full time,
[01:07:17.461]said, well, that's great. That's what I'm looking for.
[01:07:18.960]Is it so-called tenured position? He said, well,
[01:07:21.780]I have no choice.
[01:07:22.770]If someone's here on a temporary position for more than
[01:07:24.960]three years, we have to find a position for us.
[01:07:29.250]So it worked.
[01:07:30.600]And then with the all normally teaching prize,
[01:07:33.840]we got included in that was a post doc for three years.
[01:07:39.960]So we got a person,
[01:07:40.860]a Belgian woman who was working in Notre Greek,
[01:07:43.590]the international section, and attracted her.
[01:07:47.013]And now she's going to NORAD to leaving us.
[01:07:51.210]But anyway,
[01:07:52.043]we got that position. Then we got two PhD positions,
[01:07:55.560]which in Europe, at least in Norway are really quite good.
[01:07:59.984]They're they pay about 80% of what a new assistant professor
[01:08:02.970]pays. So they're, they're lucrative, very competitive.
[01:08:06.450]Well, you know, one example,
[01:08:07.680]I'd quote my dear friend and colleague Bob Wright.
[01:08:12.065]You're an extension.
[01:08:13.860]You'll learn stuff at every extension meeting.
[01:08:15.720]You take it to the next meeting and you don't quote people
[01:08:18.600]directly and you pretend like you knew it all the time,
[01:08:21.120]I guess. But yeah, we're all learning all the time.
[01:08:26.220]And I learned not to stereotype farmers out in clay center,
[01:08:30.210]actually Leroy at a meeting that
[01:08:34.470]Paul Swanson organized out
[01:08:36.330]at the county place.
[01:08:38.040]They had a big display of equipment there.
[01:08:40.020]It was all the bells and whistles and everything else.
[01:08:42.622]And there was a guy sitting to the speaker except he was in
[01:08:46.590]overall his big beard, kinda a reddish face.
[01:08:49.980]I thought, man,
[01:08:50.820]there's the prototypical redneck farmer
[01:08:54.660]in central Nebraska.
[01:08:57.630]And I'm talking to him, you know, is he listening?
[01:09:00.360]Is he hearing anything?
[01:09:03.081]And as I walked down from the podium after the thing,
[01:09:06.317]he said, damn right,
[01:09:08.190]sonny and I talked about sustainability and all stuff.
[01:09:11.350]I was just blown away. I thought, well, yeah,
[01:09:14.640]you probably know who it was.
[01:09:16.600]Okay. Yeah.
[01:09:17.433]Stick around, ask questions.
[01:09:18.630]If you like, we'll fill out the posts or if you would,
[01:09:21.045]that's on the back.
[01:09:23.097](Audience applauding)

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Exploring Co-learning in Agroecology

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