Cow up a tree

Members of the LEARN group met the 'cow up a tree' during a night walk on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees. Conceived by an artist of Anglo-Irish origin resident in Australia and displayed in Paris, the sculpture reflects the international nature of this book. Perhaps more profoundly, it captures in metaphorically stark terms the uncertain future that some consider agriculture in the western world to face. This book takes up the challenge to identify strategies to trigger new approaches.

Crises in farming, natural resource use, food systems and rural livelihoods make particular demands on R&D professionals and policy makers. Contributors to this book argue that a much needed response to these crises is to change practices associated with knowing and learning. The book presents case studies from ten countries which exemplify theories and practices that challenge prevailing understandings about learning and knowing in agricultural settings. Contributors explore how stakeholders can be induced to engage in collaborative action to learn with each other so that different ways of knowing are respected and new ways to learn and know can emerge.

To understand, and thus improve, the quality of learning processes, R&D professionals will need to get involved in the doing: they can no longer philosophise at the periphery of action but must learn with the practitioners while they take action.

An important professional role is to make learning processes explicit and a learning resource for others. Any attempt to bring learning and knowing processes into focus needs to be tackled both theoretically and methodologically to support the collective action of a wide diversity of new actors having scant experience of working together. Research, education and training are thus faced with a major discontinuity that requires on-going change.