Julie Ingram is at the 23rd European Seminar on Extension (and) Education this week in Chania, Crete, where she will be presenting a paper on behalf of a VALERIE team of co-authors from CCRI and Wageningen University.
The seminar title is Transformative learning: new directions in agricultural extension and education, and it aims to deepen understanding of current transformations in agricultural education and extension and the ways they promote transformative learning.
Education and extension (advisory) services have always been a core element in the support and development of farmers. This is more so in recent decades with farmers and land managers being urged to innovate to overcome the multiple and complex challenges (volatile markets, rising costs, unpredictable climate, environmental and resource degradation etc.) and farm in a more sustainable way. In line with this, there has been an evolution in the way researchers understand (in theory and practice) extension and innovation, shifting from perspectives that regard innovation as science-driven to ones that see it as a social process of interactive learning. This provides the backdrop for this seminar and the VALERIE paper.
The VALERIE paper is entitled ‘Integrating Co-innovation into Research Translation: Developing a Stakeholder-driven Methodology’ and was authored by Julie Ingram, Pete Gaskell, Jane Mills, Janet Dwyer (CCRI) and Pieter de Wolf (Wageningen University). The paper describes experiences in the VALERIE project where researchers and stakeholders (farmers, foresters, supply chain actors etc) are working together to translate research by identifying research problems and solutions and adapting these to local contexts (co-innovating).
Link to project www.valerie.eu
