The Community Challenge: The Learning Response

Abstract

In this presentation I intend to narrate a story that has its particular origins in three strategic decisions collectively taken, almost 20 years ago now, by a small group of educators within a small agricultural polytechnic located on the urban/rural fringe of Australia’s largest city. It is a story which arises out of the integrated thoughts and actions of an academic community, which, tired of its marginal status, decided in the late 1970s, to profoundly and concurrently transform itself as a School of Agriculture in three fundamental ways: (a) to change its own focus from production agriculture to responsible rural development, (b) to change its own emphasis from a teaching approach based on courses to one of learning based on projects, and (c) to change its own prevailing reductionist paradigm to embrace an holistic one. The mission became one of helping people in rural communities across the state, to learn their way forward to better futures, in the face of the immensely complex, dynamic, and slowly degrading environments – socio-economic, politico-cultural and bio-physical – in which they increasingly recognised they were deeply embedded. The intent would thus become that of helping people to see their worlds differently as a prelude for doing things differently – essentially more systemically. The context for this grand enterprise is captured in the aphorism ‘if we always see how we’ve always seen, we’ll always be who we’ve always been’! Changing the way we collectively construe ourselves means collectively changing the way we think about ourselves, to lead in turn, to changing the way we collectively act.

Source: Bawden (1999). Reproduced with permission. Originally this chapter was an Invited Plenary Paper: 29th Annual International Meeting of the Community Development Society. Athens Georgia 27–30th July 1997.