An epistemological paradigm shift from adaptive to systemic approach to agricultural curricula review and development in Higher Education Institutes

The limited impacts on poverty, hunger and land degradation from past efforts in agricultural training, research and outreach have been partly blamed on the education philosophy in higher education that is teacher centered and based on rigid disciplinary curricula developed solely by professionals. Currently, African higher education is going through renewal phase to address the challenge using an adaptive approach of responding by creating new courses and programmes without necessarily rethinking their educational philosophy. In this paper we draw on experiences of a “Community of practitioners” working with multi-stakeholder Innovation Platforms (IPs) established under the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSA-CP) in facilitating a process of epistemological change to link the academic world to the complex realities of communities in order to improve and extend the impacts of learning in society. A multi-stakeholder Participatory Action research learning cycle comprising of three phases (planning, implementation and evaluation) with the implementation phase consisting of four (4) workshops (multi-stakeholder partnerships, personal and team skills, organizational change and knowledge management) was used to foster transformative experiences of participation and learning. A survey of 20 stakeholders that participated in the learning cycle and 50 others interviewed in relation to the participatory development of the M.Sc. degree programme in Integrated Watershed Management (IWM) programme revealed that there is an urgent need for an epistemological paradigm change towards an integrated, systems-based perspective to learning that emphasizes, first, approaches that are student centered and foster experiential and lifelong learning; second, interconnections and interactions between different disciplines as well as recognizes and integrates indigenous or local knowledge and case studies; and thirdly, stakeholder engagement in curriculum development and implementation processes. This calls for further institutional innovations improving the connectivity between IPs and Universities and within curriculum components themselves.