Awakening senses and sensitivity to make sense in approaches of agricultural sustainability
Résumé
In this paper, we explore the awakening potentialities of original open-ended creative approaches inspired by phenomenology, built on sensitive experiences, for teaching agro-ecology. The experiment was conducted in France, within an INRA’s experimental farm station between 2016 and 2018 with more than 1200 visitors, mainly agricultural students and farmers. We designed and tested original multi-modal inquiry tools (mime, landscape drawing, land art and poetry) in order to awake senses, arouse curiosity to learn diversity and communicate different sensitivities. We found that bringing together sensorial perceptive experiences into dialogic spaces, could favour genuine experience sharing and enable to overcome pre-established categories and to transform the operative and epistemic predicates that support conventional agricultural practices. This study opens new perspectives for the design for agricultural field trips on station or agroecological commercial farms. More generally it calls for the development of a “linked” pedagogy, outdoor, sensitive, and creative with a greater consideration of intuitive reasoning, for the (re)-design of sustainable agricultural systems.