Training for alternative livestock practices: from agroecological to educational innovation - INRAE - Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Training for alternative livestock practices: from agroecological to educational innovation

Résumé

The agro-ecological transition and its linked paradigm shifts are deeply transforming the work of farmers as well as that of extension agents. The latter are compelled to act as change agents, taking local particularities and farmers' singularities into account, facilitating and guiding the expression of farmers' problems more than providing standardized recipes. In this context, it is essential to explore how the training provided by extension agents enables the professional development of farmers and strengthens their capacity to transform the work of both of them. To contribute to this issue, our article aims at describing the educational strategies of the extension agents who are experts in grazing feeding. We also seek to identify the difficulties and questions that these agents face. To do this, we conducted semidirective interviews with these agents about their professional trajectories, intentions and practices. We also observed these practices in training situations. Finally, in a collaborative perspective of reflexivity, we discussed our first analyses with them in order to together formalize the pedagogical innovations to be tested. We thus show that their advisory and training activity as well as their shared ambition to contribute to the development of less artificial livestock farms are strongly rooted in technical expertise and in the method they have designed. In spite of this, they use different training strategies and positions and express a diversity of theories on learning and on the development of farmers' skills, which are not shared among them. Although they adapt their educational service to territorial specificities and demands, they encounter many difficulties such as the heterogeneity of their audience, the appropriation of innovative knowledge, and the link between the transmission of knowledge and its practice by farmers. The link between collective training and individual support seems to be the key both to pragmatizing the knowledge transferred and to enhancing the learning potential of each individual's professional experience. Educational reflection, both on an operational and a scientific level, is then essential to examine the link between training and support in order to encourage the development of know-how for the autonomous change of farming systems. This research is based on a research-intervention setting that is particularly promising for this purpose: it will enable us to explore the ways in which the capacities of stakeholders are built in order to engage in the agro-ecological transition and to experience the innovations it implies in terms of the way they work with the living world.
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Dates et versions

hal-03981329 , version 1 (09-02-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03981329 , version 1

Citer

Madelleine Mirabal-Cano, Fanny Chrétien, Nathalie Girard. Training for alternative livestock practices: from agroecological to educational innovation. 2. International Symposium on Work in Agriculture (ISWA), Mar 2021, Clermont-Ferrand, France. ⟨hal-03981329⟩
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