scholarly journals What Skills Do Agricultural Professionals Need in the Transition towards a Sustainable Agriculture? A Qualitative Literature Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (24) ◽  
pp. 13556
Author(s):  
Laura Brandt Sørensen ◽  
Lisa Blix Germundsson ◽  
Stine Rosenlund Hansen ◽  
Claudia Rojas ◽  
Niels Heine Kristensen

Agriculture is facing mounting challenges across the globe and must move towards more sustainable practices to combat climate change and meet changed production requirements. Education has been acknowledged as highly important in a sustainable transition, but there is no clear agreement about what skills are needed for professionals in the agricultural system. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse skills needed for professionals in the agricultural system to engage in the transition towards sustainable agriculture and elaborate on the implications of this for a transition towards sustainable agriculture. The review is based on a qualitative semi-systematic literature review of 20 peer-reviewed articles concerned with sustainability, skills, and agriculture. Five categories of skills were identified and analysed, including systems perspective, lifelong learning, knowledge integration, building and maintaining networks and learning communities, and technical and subject-specific knowledge and technology. As the identified categories of skills have emerged from different contextual settings and a diverse group of actors, these five categories encourage a broad and inclusive understanding of skills that can be translated into different contextual settings, scales, and professions within the agricultural system. The article concludes that professionals engaged in the transition towards sustainable agriculture need skills that encourage a perspective that moves beyond generic discipline-based skills and instead builds on heterogeneity, inclusion, and use of different actors’ knowledge, practices, and experiences, and the ability to respond and be proactive in a constantly changing world.

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Emília Madudová ◽  

The paper examines the specific knowledge universities transfer to industry, reflecting to creative industry needs. As results shows, the most asked alumni competences should be tacit knowledge and divergent thinking. Divergent thinking influence the creativity. Creativity is often defined as the ability to develop new and useful ideas, but in deep literature review, we can see few irregularities and different definitions of creativity. The paper also evaluates the importance of creativity from business environment point of view and from the creative industry perspective and creative firm owners. As point of view. Another key finding is, that to educate creative people will be one of the key competitive advantage, because mainly the ability to create and disseminate knowledge is often at the heart of the organization's competitive advantage not only in creative industry, but in transport industry as well.


2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 552-563
Author(s):  
Chi Man Wong ◽  
Ze Wang ◽  
Agostinho C. Rosa ◽  
C. L. Philip Chen ◽  
Tzyy-Ping Jung ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Barclay ◽  
Alice Miller

Private standards, including ecolabels, have been posed as a governance solution for the global fisheries crisis. The conventional logic is that ecolabels meet consumer demand for certified “sustainable” seafood, with “good” players rewarded with price premiums or market share and “bad” players punished by reduced sales. Empirically, however, in the markets where ecolabeling has taken hold, retailers and brands—rather than consumers—are demanding sustainable sourcing, to build and protect their reputation. The aim of this paper is to devise a more accurate logic for understanding the sustainable seafood movement, using a qualitative literature review and reflection on our previous research. We find that replacing the consumer-driven logic with a retailer/brand-driven logic does not go far enough in making research into the sustainable seafood movement more useful. Governance is a “concert” and cannot be adequately explained through individual actor groups. We propose a new logic going beyond consumer- or retailer/brand-driven models, and call on researchers to build on the partial pictures given by studies on prices and willingness-to-pay, investigating more fully the motivations of actors in the sustainable seafood movement, and considering audience beyond the direct consumption of the product in question.


Author(s):  
Morris S.Y. Jong ◽  
Junjie Shang ◽  
Fong-Lok Lee ◽  
Jimmy H.M. Lee

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a constructivist pedagogical approach to empower computer game-based learning. This approach encompasses the creation of a near real-life online interactive world modeled upon a set of multi-disciplinary domains, in which each student plays a role in this “virtual world” and shapes its development. All missions, tasks and problems therein are generative and open-ended with neither prescribed strategies nor solutions. With sophisticated multi-player simulation contexts and teacher facilitation (scaffolding and debriefing), VISOLE provides opportunities for students to acquire both subject-specific knowledge and problem-solving skills through their near real-life gaming experience. This chapter aims to delineate the theoretical foundation and pedagogical implementation of VISOLE. Apart from that, the authors also introduce their game-pedagogy co-design strategy adopted in developing the first VISOLE instance—FARMTASIA.


2022 ◽  
pp. 518-531
Author(s):  
Piyali Das

Indigenous knowledge refers to the knowledge, innovations, and practices of indigenous communities. Ethnic groups are repository knowledge of herbal medicine. Many indigenous people use several plants for medicinal preparations, and these medicines are known as ethnomedicine. It has developed from experience gained over centuries. Species of ethnomedicinal plants are threatened in most of nations due to overexploitation, habitat loss, destructive harvesting techniques, unsustainable trade, and deforestation. Documented indigenous knowledge on ethnomedicine forms part of the documentary heritage of the nation. The chapter will provide a framework for design an information retrieval system for ethnomedicine or knowledge on medicinal plants that are used to manage human ailments. The framework will be prepared, established on the open source software (OSS), and is appropriate not only for documentation but also beneficial for retrieving domain-specific knowledge. The model provides a framework for resource integration digitally using Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) software.


Author(s):  
Giuliano Augusti ◽  
Sebastião Feyo de Azevedo

“General” and “field-specific” Quality Assurance procedures, although sharing many “technical” instruments (self evaluation reports, peer reviews, benchmarks vs. reference points, etc.), have different directions. The motivations behind “field-specific” initiatives are critically presented in this paper. They are strictly correlated with Qualification Frameworks that, while preserving the autonomy of higher education institutions in defining their teaching offers, define common and transparent employability objectives for the benefit of students, graduates and all other stakeholders. However, “while learning outcomes have been generically defined for the degree structure”, it is now necessary “to further develop descriptors for subject specific knowledge, skills and competences. ... leaving still plenty of freedom for programme diversity.” (Bologna Process, 2009a). Qualification Frameworks and field-specific Quality Assurance lead naturally to “pre-professional accreditation” that can be given an international value by “European Quality Labels”.


2015 ◽  
Vol 156 (3) ◽  
pp. 105-112
Author(s):  
Márta Erdei ◽  
Réka Eszter Cserepes ◽  
Antal Bugán

Introduction: The effectiveness of fertility treatments is influenced by the health care professionals’ knowledge regarding infertility as well as their empathy. Aim: The aim of the study was to examine infertility-related knowledge and perceptions of emotional and mind/body consequences of infertility among medical students. Methods: A questionnaire design was used. Data were obtained from 112 medical university students (76 women, 36 men) who participated involuntary and compensation-free. Results: Medical students’ knowledge concerning infertility proved to be incomplete and ambiguous. Subjects underestimated the presence of mind/body and emotional symptoms caused by infertility in men particularly, and overestimated some emotional concerns in women, e.g. sadness. Conclusions: Medical students have gaps in their subject-specific knowledge, so that they need more (even practical) information regarding infertility during their studies. Students’ conceptions about emotional and physical consequences of infertility are distorted by stereotypes. The risk of these biases is that it could make it difficult to perceive patients in a non-distorted way, especially infertile male patients. Orv. Hetil., 2015, 156(3), 105–112.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 3842 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Holmberg ◽  
Johan Larsson

Central in leadership for sustainability transitions is the capability to create transformative momentum in a sustainable (desirable) direction, calling for meaningful conversations on sustainable futures. The aim of this study is to develop a conceptual framework to inspire and support such conversations. A qualitative literature review of sustainability conceptualizations was conducted, followed by a thematic analysis. The resulting framework consists of an overarching question and an accompanying set of categories for four sustainability dimensions: the social, the economic, the ecological, and ‘human needs and wellbeing’. Furthermore, the framework is visualized as a lighthouse for pedagogical reasons. We foresee that the lighthouse might be of value in processes guiding socio-technical transitions towards sustainability in three different ways: (1) by attempting to bridge the issue of ‘transition’ with that of ‘sustainability’; (2) as part of a backcasting process; and (3) modes of transdisciplinary research where relevant actors take part in the conversation. The study is related to over 20 years of experience from working with a backcasting approach engaging with sustainability transitions in a variety of processes. We invite further dialogue on how one may approach the concept of sustainability to inspire and support conversations on sustainable futures.


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