The need to strengthen the connection between academia and society has received increased attention over the past years. The importance of bringing university students closer to stakeholders in society as part of their learning process is high regarding sustainable agriculture, because of its applied approach. University programs based on experiential and action-oriented learning have been developed over the past decades, but more knowledge is needed about the impact of these educational activities. In a short course in sustainable agriculture at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Bra, Italy, we examined the impacts of experiential and action-oriented learning on competency development as well as transformational impacts on the students. We found that students improve on several core competences as a result of their participation in the short course, and also signs of deep transformational processes among the students.

Three graduate-level short courses on ecological agriculture and food systems were held in 1995–1997 in Norway to introduce systems thinking, creative research methods, and innovative learning appr...

The TATA-BOX model provides a practical and operational set of methods for helping multiple stakeholders design an agroecological transition at the local level. It provides a framework for researchers to study current methods and design future systems based on ecological principles. In contrast to extreme technology-driven agriculture and globalisation of food systems, this strategy returns control to the local level. Location-specific planning provides an imaginative model for sustainable development, building potential to overcome crippling bureaucracy of governments and tyranny of narrowly vested interests that result from a “productionist model” that has prevailed over the past century. The new model based on “post-normal science” is defined in terms of participatory, integrated assessment, involving all stakeholders in local development, working in transdisciplinary teams. The process addresses “wicked”, complex current and future challenges today, problems involving multiple people and incommensurate goals. This requires careful study, reasoned discussion, and thoughtful compromise to reach common ground. Principles include holistic thinking, whole systems focus in the local context, involving multiple stakeholders, local autonomy, linking production with consumption in local food systems, and broad-based governance at the community, landscape, and terroir levels. This can assure participation in decision making, and action, leading to adoption of transformative systems.

Educational strategies globally are changing from an authoritative, top-down model to one focused on greater student and stakeholder participation in planning and implementation of research and educational activities. In addition to emphasis on student-centered education, strategies currently evolve to encompass learning organizations and multistakeholder learning networks. These are essential to address the complexity and scope of tomorrow’s challenges, involving issues that could be called ’wicked problems’ not easily addressed by single disciplines nor resulting in solutions that please all the players. In this study we describe how a transformative innovation – the NEXTFOOD educational approach – may contribute substantially to a transition of agricultural and food education and how it can be developed and diffused within and between teaching institutions. The method was action research informed by several workshops organized at annual consortium conferences during the first three years of the project. The findings show that a successful transformation involves learning both within and across innovation projects repeated at various organisations in a network. The action research model presented in this paper may be useful as an instrument to support the facilitation of transformative innovations. The transition process resulted in substantial changes in mindset, educational practices and organisational structures at the teaching institutions. However, scaling-up promising educational initiatives may encounter several barriers that need to be overcome at individual, group and institutional levels, and we provide insight on how this can be accomplished in a multi-national consortium of universities.

Educational strategies globally are changing from an authoritative, top-down model to one focused on greater student and stakeholder participation in planning and implementation of research and educational activities. In addition to emphasis on student-centered education, strategies currently evolve to encompass learning organizations and multistakeholder learning networks. These are essential to address the complexity and scope of tomorrow’s challenges, involving issues that could be called ’wicked problems’ not easily addressed by single disciplines nor resulting in solutions that please all the players. Such incommensurate problems make it essential to tap into all possible sources of information, to explore multiple learning strategies for solutions, and to seek answers that will be acceptable to all those impacted. The NEXTFOOD project ( https://www.nextfood-project.eu/) is used as an example of how these goals for educational change were set, and how a transformation through their implementation is played out. In this study we aimed to identify transformation challenges of a collaborative global network and to suggest practical solutions for how these challenges can be overcome. The method was action research informed by several workshops organized at annual consortium conferences during the first three years of the project. The findings show that a successful transformation involves ownership by all the players, meaningful and lasting changes in roles of various players and their institutions, willingness to experiment with new methods, and shared responsibility for outputs and impacts. The NEXTFOOD partners made concerted efforts to overcome institutional, disciplinary, and long-established barriers to this type of transformation in education, and have dealt with the unique pandemic challenges to creating a meaningful transition that will emerge as a resilient and pro-active strategy for the continual improvement of transformative education.