Abstract
The sustainability of the food system is at the forefront of academic and policy discussions as we face the challenge of providing food security to a growing population amidst environmental uncertainty and depletion, social disruptions, and structural economic shocks and stresses. Crafting a sustainable and resilient food system requires us to go beyond disciplinary boundaries and broaden critical and creative thinking skills. Recent literature calls for examples of pedagogical transformations from food systems courses to identify successful practices and potential challenges. We offer a recipe for what to teach by framing systems thinking concepts, then discuss how to teach it with five learning activities: deductive case studies, experiential learning, reflective narrative learning, system dynamics simulations and scenarios, and inductive/open-ended case studies, implemented with collaborative group learning, inter/trans-disciplinarity, and instructor-modeled co-learning. Each learning activity is animated with concrete examples from our courses at Oregon State University, University of Minnesota, and University of Vermont, USA. We discuss opportunities and challenges implementing these strategies in light of student, instructor, and institutional expectations and constraints. But the challenge is worth the effort, because food system transformation requires active learners and systemic thinkers as engaged citizens, food system advocates, entrepreneurs, and policy makers.
Highlights
The sustainability of the food system is coming to the forefront of academic and policy discussions
Responding to Valley et al.’s [1] recommendation to share examples of pedagogical transformations, our goal is to put some “meat on the bones” of the food systems pedagogy literature with concrete examples from our university food systems courses taught at Oregon State University, University of Minnesota, and University of Vermont, USA, all housed in Applied Economics Departments but teaching food systems courses that serve undergraduate and graduate interdisciplinary degree programs
We will first give examples from our courses to demonstrate how systems thinking is explicitly incorporated throughout a food systems course by detailing the structure of systems thinking that we introduce to students, and how our applied economics lens supports the concepts
Summary
The sustainability of the food system is coming to the forefront of academic and policy discussions. We face the challenge of providing food security to a growing population amidst short-run shocks and long-term stresses to the system. These include environmental uncertainty and depletion arising in part from impacted agricultural systems, social disruptions from resource conflicts, and structural economic shocks and stresses such as chronic income inequality. Undergraduate and graduate students are poised to engage the wicked problems of the food system, putting university education to the task of supplying the tools and knowledge that they need through interdisciplinary food systems or sustainable agriculture programs at universities [1,7,8,9,10,11]. A key goal for a food systems course or program is to bring the complex universe of food system actors, interconnections, and their social, economic, and environmental outcomes under one umbrella, which can be accomplished with a focus on systems thinking concepts
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