2021 ASI

"Eating is the most intimate interaction between people and the environment. The act of eating is placing the environment within your own body, making it part of yourself."

Welcome!

The Agroecology Summer Intensive (ASI) is a residential program based at Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center’s Rieth Village. This ten-week summer intensive is the keystone of our major and minor in Sustainable Food Systems, but is open to students of all majors and welcomes students from other colleges who can transfer earned credits to their home institutions.

The Agroecology Summer Intensive is a program focusing on sustainable agriculture with emphasis on interconnected systems and interdisciplinary learning, making the ASI program broadly relevant. Agroecology is an important part of the growing effort to make human activities more compatible with natural ecosystems. ASI students not only learn about growing food, but also gain practical life skills while engaging in interdisciplinary, culturally-rich learning. Not only will students learn science concepts, students will also learn about cooking, nutrition, social systems, and the economy of food and farming!

ASI Learning Objectices

1. Raise food for self and others in cooperation with soil, plant, animal, and human communities across a given landscape

2. Articulate hope for the future in our growing adoption of sound agroecological solutions that store carbon in soils and contribute to the regeneration of our lands, waters, and societies.

3. Cultivate an evolving personal “ethic of eating” based on experiences throughout the food system including: production practices, workers’ rights, equitable supply chains, and meaningful labeling

4. Experience and reflect on the mental, spiritual, emotional, and physical benefits of tending growing things and sharing meals; consider how to pass these benefits on to others.

5. Articulate the roles of food literacy/education, food security, food policy, and food sovereignty in building a food-oriented community development strategy using food and agriculture to create economic opportunities, healthy neighborhoods, and build community assets, pride, and power.

6. Apply a systems-thinking approach to developing lasting solutions to complex social-environmental-economic issues in the food system.

7. Envision bringing about a more just, regenerative, and equitable food system through vocation, innovation, advocacy, and lifestyle.

Our Pedagogy

• Understanding sustainability models and transitioning from the Triple Bottom Line model to Quadruple Bottom Line: People, Planet, Profit, & Purpose

  • “Purpose” explicitly pulls out this idea that sustainable solutions must also feed our soul; this includes spiritual fulfillment, joy, aesthetics, artistic expression, cultural relevance, etc. Any solution put forward must attend to this aspect. This also shifts the conversation from “how do we build solutions?” to “what beliefs, ideas, and worldviews are powerful enough to motivate me and others to work for change?”

• Enabling you to take meaningful and well-supported risks

  • letters to policy makers, caring for animals, butchering, designing Ed Garden, putting on a public program, putting on a farm-to-table dinner, running a CSA, etc.

• Paying attention to each student's "Affective Arc of Learning" (see below)

• Building knowledge within a Residential Learning Community

• Experience working between multiple (sometimes conflicting) stakeholders to find common ground and make progress towards a common goal; emphasis is placed on learning how to work with people and organizations that might be quite different from you; sustainability work is all about building coalitions

• The summer is all about hands-on experiential learning; you literally learn through activity and real-world experiences scaffolded with discussion. There is less emphasis on readings and written assignments compared to a standard semester class

• Reflection - we employ reflection throughout the semester to help you make connections, gain new insights, and synthesize/organize your learning

• Full semester integration - every course you take during this semester has the potential to inform all other courses in the semester. Taking then all at once allows us to bring in elements from across the semester as they relate to individual class discussions

• Transformative Learning - the learning taking place during this semester often leads to (i) changes in how you understand yourself and how you relate to the world, (ii) revision of your own belief systems, and (iii) changes in your lifestyle

• Much of our learning is place-based. We focus on food system elements in our local place while also considering connections to the larger state, region, nation, and globe. Our local community is our classroom!

• We emphasize the need for true interdisciplinarity - integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines, using a real synthesis of approaches - in order to work on “wicked” complex sustainability problems

• We also foster the use of a wider systems thinking framework when dealing with complex and irreducible systems (holistic management, concept maps, causal loop diagrams)

• We strive to bring students through the whole process. Whether that is going from shearing a goat to making felt or visiting all pieces of an industrial chicken production system, etc.

• Authentic Experiences - what you see and experience during this semester is how the world is. These are not contrived experiences but an immersion into reality. We operate as an open community of learners, thinkers, and doers. Your instructors are learning alongside you the entire time. Sometimes there is no telling what is going to happen and how it will shape us!

Finding your "Purpose" or your "Reason for Being"

Finding Jobs in the Real World:

https://www.goshen.edu/academics/sustainable-food-systems/sustainable-food-systemsfood-system-careers/