Digging into Pedagogy and Learning for Agroecology

This scholarship is based on a reflective action research approach and stimulated by our team’s commitment to honing their own pedagogical practices by sharing learnings, mistakes and innovations to inform others.

Agroecology and Teaching at UVM



Pedagogy in movements for agroecology and food sovereignty
Social movements, peasant organizations and radical educators have been deeply engaged in education for food system transformation, which opens the door to social transformation. Our scholarly work includes examining how processes of education and learning are being deployed in movements for agroecology and food sovereignty, largely outside of the sphere of formal education.
This work focuses on learning as a social movement strategy, and is based on participatory action research (PAR) and on close collaboration and solidarity with our partners and grassroots educations in organizations and communities.


In this sub-area of our work, Nils McCune has long-standing work on learning processes with social movements in Latin America and North America (see publications here). For example, in his co-authored article on “teaching the territory”, Nils examines peasant-to-peasant learning in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean, calling for educational theory and practice to move beyond the focus on the individual towards a focus on the concept of the territory as a collective learning process.
In addition, Colin Anderson has carried out action research with partners in social movements and transformative learning in Europe, in which they propose four pillars of transformative agroecological learning, published in a special issue on learning in food movements.