We needed a flexible design that could cope with increasing student numbers and do more justice to the variety of backgrounds and disciplines represented in our classroom. Next to that we wanted to move beyond theory and let students actively experiment with agroforestry systems or even design their own. The interest of the students in our course and developments in the field of agroforestry also justified an expansion from 3 to 6 credits.

The first actual steps to designing the new 6 credit course were taken by Madelon Lohbeck and Danae Rozendaal during several UTQ courses. But as the field of agroforestry is interdisciplinary in its nature, so is our teaching team. To make sure we would have all perspectives represented in the new design and all teachers on board we turned to the Design Lab. It took some effort to clear the agenda’s but we managed to sit down a whole day with the teaching team, including some of our students and we made the blue print for what it now a great new course.

1. Explain the concept of agroforestry, describe the diversity of agroforestry systems across the globe

2. Analyse the ecological interactions among trees, crops and livestock and how farmers manage these for desired outcomes

3. Evaluate the synergies and trade-offs between multiple products and services of agroforestry systems (across time and space)

4. Evaluate how formal and informal socio-cultural institutions (including markets) affect agroforestry systems

5. Critically evaluate basic hypotheses in agroforestry

6. Design an agroforestry system including management planning tailored to specific contexts and desired outcomes

The concept of ‘learning arches’ from the Design Lab turned out to be very useful for structuring our course. These arches represent a process of learning with a clear start and ending. In the picture below you see the arches for each learning outcome. Since we teach in Period 4 the course has to fit a 4-week time frame, which we decided to roughly cut in two parts. The first part has predominantly lower cognitive learning outcomes where we lay the foundation for more higher cognitive and applied activities in the second part. Having an exam halfway the course stimulates students to be active right from the start. Because the exam focuses on lower cognitive learning outcomes we can organize it efficiently in ANS. Within the first part of the course we also use a thematic build-up starting with smaller scales such as plots and farm and then zooming out to landscapes and regions.

Figure 1: Course structure

We wanted students with all kind of backgrounds to be able to relate to the content of the course and make them aware that agroforestry is basically everywhere, not only in the tropics. That’s why we put three excursions right at the start of the course. These excursions provide students with different examples of agroforestry and stimulate them to observe, ask questions and think about what agroforestry actually is.

• Day 1: Do you have agroforestry in your surroundings?
  Students have to go outside, take pictures of what they consider agroforestry and think of arguments to defend that claim. They upload their pictures on MS teams and discuss the pictures with their peers in the MS teams channel.
• Day 2: Explore temperate agroforestry in the Wageningen surroundings.
• Students can track locations in the Peek app where they got access to podcasts in which they received information by the land owner or manager, and had to answer some questions pertaining to that location.
• Day 3: Explore tropical agroforestry systems in Africa, Asia and Latin America

Students join a video session with experts located at three different continents. They have to prepare questions.