Abstract
In this paper we use a critically reflective research approach to analyze our efforts at transformative learning in food systems education in a land grant university. As a team of learners across the educational hierarchy, we apply scholarly tools to the teaching process and learning outcomes of student-centered inquiries in a food systems course. The course, an interdisciplinary, lower division undergraduate course at the University of California, Davis is part of a new undergraduate major in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. We provide an overview of the course’s core elements—labs, exams, assignments, and lectures—as they relate to social constructivist learning theory and student-centered inquiries. Then, through qualitative analysis of students’ reflective essays about their learning experiences in the course, we demonstrate important transformative outcomes of student-centered inquiries: (1) most students confronted the commodity fetish and tried to reconcile tensions between what the food system is and ought to be, and (2) students repositioned themselves, their thinking, and social deliberation in relation to the food system. Students’ reflections point to the power of learning that emerges through their inquiry process, including in the field, and from critical self-reflection. We also highlight the importance of reflective essays in both reinforcing experiential learning and in helping instructors to better understand students’ learning vis-à-vis our teaching.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Galt is a professor and sole instructor of record for the class. Parr was a Ph.D. candidate in education during course development. Galt hired Parr to co-design the class and to facilitate the experiential learning aspects in lab. Course design also involved Lickter, an undergraduate student who provided regular feedback during the course. Van Soelen Kim was a teaching assistant (TA) for the course in 2008 and 2009. Beckett provided feedback on course design elements and became a course TA in 2009 and 2010. Ballard, a professor in the School of Education, provided consultation on revisions for the course between 2008 and 2009.
As a lecture-lab class, the course is scalable; lecture size can increase and additional lab sections can be added to maintain the integrity of the course. Since 2008 we have found that labs of 15 students work very well, and can have 20 students before losing their close-knit atmosphere. Lectures can be larger since the techniques used can be used in larger class sizes. If teaching assistants are allocated to labs of 15–20 students, the grading burden, which is substantial because of the four papers involved, remains bearable for the instructor and TAs.
Laurie Thorp of Michigan State University provided consultation to help Galt move from broad course goals to specify competencies that students would develop.
These included elaborating and voting on lecture topics; interviewing the professor on the first day to break the ice and show the professor’s humanity; working together in team projects; and actively asking questions about the exam. We do not have space to elaborate on each of these techniques, but can more information through personal communication.
For example, one question asked: “Why do we humans eat what we eat? Why do some have plenty to eat, while others go hungry? Use at least two different social science perspectives in your answer to each question. Be sure to address the role of personal choice, culture and social structures, and the biophysical environment.”
Although each lab was designed beforehand, the TAs exercised a moderate amount of autonomy over the lab experience. Weekly meetings with the professor allowed TAs to rehearse and revise the lab. TAs helped alter the contents of the lab as the quarter progressed and for the next year. Subsequent course revisions based on student feedback have greatly increased the number of lab field trips, so that every other lab session involves fieldwork, while the sessions in between are presentations of findings from the previous week’s trip and preparation for the next week’s trip.
Giving students the framework of values and criteria explicitly linked the empirical and the normative, but was conceptually challenging for both new teaching assistants who independently instructed lab, and for undergraduate students, many of whom did not have the conceptual basis or vocabulary to grasp it immediately. In the subsequent year, the course renovations team (see Galt et al. 2010, p. v) chose to drop the values and criteria framework as a singular framing of the normative and empirical, focusing instead on pre-existing theoretical lenses with different epistemologies—positivism, political economy, and feminism—for students to employ in their fieldwork. The theoretical lenses made the connection between the normative and empirical explicit, but these were already decided for students because they were assigned one of these theoretical lenses for their fieldwork. The adoption of theoretical lenses yielded positive results to be described in future work.
This explanation does not include everything students did, and we note that the sheer number of activities and frequent due dates overwhelmed some students. In subsequent course offerings, we honed some assignments and removed those not helping to advance the course learning goals.
One student did not write a reflective essay, while the only hard copy of the one essay missing from our analysis was returned to the student before a copy was made.
The assignment has since been substantially modified, simplified in many parts but with greater elaboration provided on the reflection process.
We normed our coding techniques by independently applying them to a few reflective essays and comparing our results, which provided a venue in which to discuss discrepancies in our code use. Once normed, each reflective essay was independently coded by two of the authors. Both codings made it into the final code sheets.
Three students’ reflective essays completely lacked reflection, being instead descriptions of course activities and concepts learned, rather than reflecting on the personal outcomes of their learning processes. One student also did not turn in a reflective essay.
References
Alkon, A.H., and J. Agyeman (eds.). 2011. Cultivating food justice: Race, class, and sustainability. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Allen, P. 2010. Realizing justice in local food systems. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 3(2): 295–308.
Allen, P. 2008. Mining for justice in the food system: Perceptions, practices, and possibilities. Agriculture and Human Values 25(2): 157–161.
Bain, K. 2004. What the best college teachers do. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Barr, R.E., and J. Tagg. 2000. From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education. In Learning from change: Landmarks in teaching and learning in higher education from Change magazine, 1969–1999, ed. D. DeZure, 198–200. Sterling: Stylus Publications.
Bawden, R. 2005. A commentary on three papers. Agriculture and Human Values 22(2): 169–176.
Berry, W. 1990. The pleasures of eating. In Our sustainable table, ed. R. Clark, 125. San Francisco: North Point Press.
Brookfield, S. 1995. Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Buttel, F.H. 2006. Sustaining the unsustainable: Agro-food systems and environment in the modern world. In Handbook of rural studies, ed. P.J. Cloke, T. Marsden, and P.H. Mooney, 213–229. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Clarke, P., and T. Hamilton. 2010. Beyond tinkering: High demand × high support: Challenging rather than accommodating problems in higher education. http://web.mac.com/beyondtinkering/Beyond_Tinkering_In_Higher_Education/Welcome.html.
Flavell, J.H. 1979. Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist 34(10): 906–911.
Freire, P. 1973. Education for critical consciousness. New York: Seabury Press.
Galt, R.E. 2012. CRD 20: Food systems. http://hcd.ucdavis.edu/faculty/webpages/galt/personal/Galt_Faculty_Page/CRD_20.html.
Galt, R.E., D.M. Parr, J. Van Soelen Kim, J. Beckett, L. O’Sullivan, M. Lickter, A. White, H.L. Ballard, and M. Van Horn 2010. Lab manual version 3.0 for CRD 20: Food systems. Davis. http://hcd.ucdavis.edu/faculty/webpages/galt/personal/Galt_Faculty_Page/CRD_20_Archive_files/CRD%2020%202010%20Lab%20Manual%20Version%203.pdf.
Goodman, M.K. 2008. “Did Ronald McDonald also tend to scare you as a child?”: Working to emplace consumption, commodities and citizen-students in a large classroom setting. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 32(3): 365–386.
Guthman, J. 2008. Bringing good food to others: Investigating the subjects of alternative food practice. Cultural Geographies 15(4): 431–447.
Guthman, J. 2007. Commentary on teaching food: Why I am fed up with Michael Pollan et al. Agriculture and Human Values 24(2): 261–264.
Harvey, D. 1990. Between space and time: Reflections on the geographical imagination. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80(3): 418–434.
hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.
Ison, R.L. 1990. Teaching threatens sustainable agriculture. Gatekeeper series no. 21. London: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
Jonassen, D.H. 1994. Thinking technology: Toward a constructivist design model. Educational Technology 34(4): 34–37.
Kent, M., D.D. Gilbertson, and C.O. Hunt. 1997. Fieldwork in geography teaching: A critical review of the literature and approaches. Journal of Geography in Higher Education 21(3): 313–332.
Lattuca, L.R., L.J. Voigt, and K.Q. Fath. 2004. Does interdisciplinarity promote learning? The Review of Higher Education 28(1): 23–48.
Lieblein, G., T.A. Breland, and N. Sriskandarajah 2005. Analysis of a farming system and conversion planning: Guidelines for the project work in Agroecology and Farming Systems (PAE302), NOVA University Network Agroecology M.Sc. Program.
Lieblein, G., E. Østergaard, and C. Francis. 2004. Becoming an agroecologist through action education. International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 2(3): 147–153.
McKinney, K. 2007. Enhancing learning through the scholarship of teaching and learning: The challenges and joys of juggling. Bolton: Anker Pub. Co.
Mezirow, J. 1995. Transformation theory of adult learning. In In defense of the lifeworld: Critical perspectives on adult learning, ed. M.R. Welton, 39–70. New York: State University of New York Press.
Novak, J.D. 2010. Learning, creating, and using knowledge: Concept maps as facilitative tools in schools and corporations. New York: Routledge.
Palmer, P.J. 2000. Divided no more: A movement approach to educational reforms. In Learning from change: Landmarks in teaching and learning in higher education from Change magazine, 1969–1999, ed. D. DeZure, 15–19. Sterling: Stylus Publications.
Parr, D.M., C.J. Trexler, N. Khanna, and B.T. Battisti. 2007. Designing sustainable agriculture education: Academics’ suggestions for an undergraduate curriculum at a land-grant university. Agriculture and Human Values 24(4): 523–533.
Parr, D.M., and M. Van Horn. 2006. Development of organic and sustainable agricultural education at the University of California, Davis: A closer look at practice and theory. Horttechnology 16(3): 426–431.
Read, J. 2009. A genealogy of homo-economicus: Neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity. Foucault Studies 6: 25–36.
Redden, E. 2009. Green revolution. Inside Higher Ed, 23 April. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/23/agriculture.
Schlosser, E. 2002. Fast food nation: The dark side of the all-American meal. New York: Perennial.
Schön, D.A. 1983. The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.
Taylor, E.W. 2007. An update of transformative learning theory: A critical review of the empirical research (1999–2005). International Journal of Lifelong Education 26(2): 173–191.
Trexler, C.J., D.M. Parr, and N. Khanna. 2006. A Delphi study of agricultural practitioners’ opinions: Necessary experiences for inclusion in an undergraduate sustainable agricultural major. Journal of Agricultural Education 47(4): 15–25.
Voorhees, R.A. 2001. Competency-based learning models: A necessary future. New Directions for Institutional Research 2001(110): 5–13.
Weise, E. 2009. On tiny plots, a new generation of farmers emerges. USA Today, 13 July. http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2009-07-13-young-farmers_N.htm.
West, E.J. 2004. Perry’s legacy: Models of epistemological development. Journal of Adult Development 11(2): 61–70.
Acknowledgments
An Undergraduate Instructional Improvement Program grant from UC Davis’s Teaching Resources Center and a Chancellor’s Fellow Course Development Award supported course development, as did evaluative consultations with Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Mikaela Huntzinger. The Columbia Foundation and Heller Foundation provided support for the development of the major, Parr's salary as a postdoctoral scholar with the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, and Ballard's involvement as a collaborator in improving the class. We gratefully acknowledge the comments on previous drafts from Katie Bradley, Jennifer Gardner, Frank Hirtz, Libby O’Sullivan, and Tracy Perkins. We remain responsible for oversights and errors.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Galt, R.E., Parr, D., Van Soelen Kim, J. et al. Transformative food systems education in a land-grant college of agriculture: the importance of learner-centered inquiries. Agric Hum Values 30, 129–142 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-012-9384-8
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-012-9384-8