The ultimate goals of the master’s course in Agroecology at the NMBU Norwegian University of Life Sciences are to reduce the distance between academia and society and to bridge the all too frequent gap between knowing and doing with regard to complex challenges such as sustainability of agrifood systems.
The course is based on experiential and action-oriented learning where competence development and life-long learning by the student is equally important as the subject agroecology.
Open-ended cases in the field are starting points for learning about agroecosystems (ontology) and arenas for learning and training of competences needed to make the cases more sustainable (epistemology). Theory plays a key supporting role to structure the students’ case inquiry, help them make sense of their observations, guide their analyses, inspire their visioning, help them critically evaluate possible solutions and, especially, inform their development of competences and life-long learning skills. Students, professors, and agrifood system stakeholders co-create knowledge, and professors take more of a facilitating role for the students’ experiential learning than acting as traditional classroom lecturers transmitting knowledge.
