Abstract
<p style="text-align:justify">Personal connections to agriculture have decreased considerably in Finland during the last few decades due to struc-tural changes in agriculture. In this study, we will elucidate the understanding and conception of agriculture amongst urban pupils who have grown up during the 21st century. The research strategy consists of intervention in form of a farm visit, with pre- and post-assessment. The methods for collecting data were drawings for gaining a diversified un-derstanding of how pupils understand, experience and conceptualise agriculture. The drawings were analysed by visual content analysis. In addition, interviews, analysed by inductive content analysis method, were used to clarify the re-sults. Qualities of farms as authentic learning environments are defined and studied The study revealed that many pupils had irrational conceptions of agriculture before the farm visit (38 %), but decreased significantly after the visit. One of the explaining factors for these irrational conceptions was considered to be the influence of media sources. Farms as educational learning environments were able to correct pupils’ false conceptions. A realistic image of agriculture is of significant value for becoming an aware and responsible consumer as well as choosing a career in agriculture.</p>
Highlights
Citizens of today’s rural and urban societies, in Finland as well as internationally, are gaining a distance spatially, socially as well as culturally to agriculture
Children’s conception of agriculture does differ from reality, even though they have studied the subject in school
Their conception includes several irrational elements that might be traced to media sources
Summary
Citizens of today’s rural and urban societies, in Finland as well as internationally, are gaining a distance spatially, socially as well as culturally to agriculture. In 1950–1975 Finland followed the same process as most Western countries and developed from an agricultural society to an industrialised one (Ahonen, 2003). 50 years ago, most Finns had relatives on farms or had other social contacts with agriculture and were able to genuinely experience agriculture and a farm culture. Today’s growing generation has infrequent or no contacts at all with agriculture. This might be one of the reasons why urban Finnish children have been found to express romanticised images of agriculture (Smeds et al, 2011). Pupils in many countries have insufficient knowledge of agriculture (Mabie & Baker, 1994; Trexler, 2000)
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