Book of Abstract (incl. addendum) - IFSA symposium 2012

Workshop 5.3 Research-Education-Action platform for land management and territorial
development
Analyzing research practices of education experiences for agriculture and
territory development
Sylvie Lardon and Christophe Albaladejo
INRA, France
Sylvie.Lardon@gmail.com
An INRA working group of researchers and teachers implied in education and training on agriculture
and territory development highlights their practices and the new skills and competences they
developed. They analyze their experiences by asking these questions:
• Action: What are the territorial dynamics involved? Who are the stakeholders? How do they
bring new forms of knowledge? How to evaluate the impact of research and education on the
territorial processes?
• Education: How to conceive innovative education and training programs in order to develop
new skills? Who is concerned? How to evaluate the educational properties of such collective
experiments?
• Research: What are the researcher’s conceptual frameworks? What disciplines are combined?
How to interact in a participatory process with all the actors concerned? How to enhance the
value of the produced knowledge?
The analysis of ten experiences resulted in a first typology of the degree and modalities of participation
of the researchers and teachers, the students and training persons and the institutional actors, in a
shared partnership for the emergence and the governance of innovative processes.
To formalize the contribution of education and training to these action-researches and multi
stakolders approaches, we use the five concepts (interdisciplinarity, connection to the field, spatiotemporal
relationship, context dependence adaptation and reflexivity) of the Research-Education-
Action platform which could become a collaborative one to conduce the change in agriculture and
territory development.
New skills and competences have to be improved by all the participants (researchers, teachers,
students and training persons, institutional actors) of these collective knowledge processes.
Supporting integration and co-development as processes of collective action
and learning in catchment management in Australia
Margaret Ayre and Ruth Nettle
University of Melbourne, Australia
Mayre@unimelb.edu.au
In this paper we describe the outcomes of an action research inquiry into knowledge making as part of
a large interdisciplinary catchment research project, the Farms, Rivers and Markets (FRM) project.
The FRM Project aimed to integrate academic research and community knowledge/s in the
development of new water management options in an agricultural region, the Goulburn-Broken
catchment in north-eastern Victoria, Australia. Key findings of this research include the dynamics and
processes that support integration amongst diverse disciplinary knowledges, and knowledge
partnerships between integrated research projects and diverse communities of practice in agriculture
and water management. We understand action learning to involve coordinating a variety of disparate
practices—including materials (e.g. objects and ‘things’), textual resources (e.g. written plans and
documents) and social technologies (e.g. groups of researchers and stakeholders; theories)—to produce
new knowledge and practices through collaborations. We ask: What kind of educational processes
(including action learning) support knowledge transfer in research and teaching institutions? In
addressing this question, we describe processes that both planned (part of research design) and
emergent (iteratively designed) and are characterised by: collective action, reflection and commitment;
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