Abstract
Undergraduate courses provide valuable opportunities to train and empower students with the knowledge, skills, and motivation to advance society in more sustainable directions. This article emphasizes the value of bridging primary scientific research with undergraduate education through the presentation of an integrated experiential learning and primary research model called Farm-based Authentic Research Modules in Sustainability Sciences (FARMS). FARMS are collaboratively designed with agricultural stakeholders through a community needs assessment on pressing food system issues and opportunities with the objective for faculty and students to jointly identify evidence-based management solutions. We illustrate the implementation of FARMS in an undergraduate course in Ecological Agriculture at Dartmouth College, NH where students assessed various agroecological solutions for managing plant vitality, weeds, soil quality, pests, pollinators, and biodiversity at the Dartmouth Organic Farm. Student reflections indicate that the FARMS course component was beneficial for understanding agroecological theories and concepts while also motivating involvement in sustainability sciences despite the challenges of primary research. Educator reflections noted that the FARMS pedagogical approach facilitated achieving course objectives to develop students’ ability for systems thinking, critical thinking, and interdisciplinarity while fostering students’ collaboration skills and overall motivation for creating change. Adopting the FARMS model should enable faculty in the sustainability sciences to serve as bridges between the learning, practicing, and scientific communities while supporting educational programming at student and community farms. Ultimately, it is expected that the implementation of FARMS will increase student capacity and prepare the next generation of leaders to address complex challenges of the food system using an evidence-based approach.
Highlights
1.1 Need and opportunity Efforts to promote agroecology and sustainable food systems have developed in the past few decades with the goal to address the environmental externalities, public health concerns, and socio-economic issues associated with the modern food system
This article emphasizes the value of bridging primary scientific research with undergraduate education focused on identifying and implementing sustainability solutions through an evidencebased approach
We present a type of integrative experiential learning and primary research model for undergraduate food systems curricula that can be implemented at student university-based farms, which we refer to as Farm-based Authentic Research Modules in Sustainability Sciences (FARMS)
Summary
1.1 Need and opportunity Efforts to promote agroecology and sustainable food systems have developed in the past few decades with the goal to address the environmental externalities, public health concerns, and socio-economic issues associated with the modern food system. Agroecology and sustainable food systems pro-actively support environmental and human wellbeing. From a public health perspective, the modern food system is associated with the supply of foods linked to diet-related chronic diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancers (Horrigan et al, 2002). Interacting political, market, population, and other societal factors further perpetuate a food system characterized by unsustainable modes of production, heightened consumption of resources, social equity issues, and food insecurity (Breggin and Myers, 2013; de Wit and Iles, 2016; Gomiero et al, 2011). Institutes of higher education have a crucial role to play in the development of professionals whose work will directly shape the food system towards advancing
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