Facilitating unlearning in agricultural education: preparing for family-farm succession

Purpose: This paper seeks to explore the manner in which secondary vocational education in agriculture can facilitate unlearning among young farmers. In this context, ‘unlearning’ means deliberately letting go of mindsets, practices, and routines that are no longer fit for purpose. Design/Methodology/Approach: We use a course on sustainable family-farm succession as a case study in order to illustrate how unlearning may feature in agricultural education. We organised focus-group sessions with three teachers of that course. The sessions focused on three subprocesses of unlearning: (i) initial destabilisation, (ii) ongoing discarding and experimentation, and (iii) developing and relinquishing. Findings: We show that teachers can facilitate unlearning, and discuss how teachers may help students to navigate intergenerational tensions in unlearning. We conclude that unlearning is a layered concept: it involves adaptation to a changing agriculture sector context as much as emancipation from the social context. We also show how expressions of solidarity and loyalty may undermine unlearning. Practical implications: Agricultural educators are increasingly being tasked with helping future food professionals to manage the complexity of food systems. Our analysis points to means by which teachers who are seeking to reshape agricultural education may adopt the concept of unlearning in order to foster young farmers’ consciousness and agency in food system transformation. Theoretical implications: A pedagogy of unlearning can contribute to designing education that enables young farmers to overcome path dependency in farm succession. Originality/Value: This paper proposes unlearning as an innovative pedagogy for farmers’ training in view of food system transformation.