Agricultural school pupils caught between society goals? How do we support them for the future?

Agricultural schools are central to Swedish food production, as they train a large part of the industry's workforce and future farmers. These pupils will work in an industry that faces major challenges in terms of both adaptations to a new climate, financial challenges and increasing demands from society in terms of increased production as well as increased sustainability.

The aim of this project is to:

1) explore agricultural school pupils’ views on agricultural challenges from a social sustainability perspective. This will be done more briefly among all pupils by the use of a quantitative inquiry (a survey) and more deeply among a selection of pupils with a specialization in agriculture by the use of a qualitative inquiry (semi-structured interviews).
2) adapt two existing SLU-developed educational tools, Climate game and Meat the four futures podcast to education at agricultural schools and test them in practice at agricultural schools with different groups of pupils.

This will be done through

1) interviews with agricultural students and their teachers and a survey for all pupils.

2) adaptation and testing at organic farming schools of two pedagogical tools - the KliMATspelet and Meat for four futures, (in Swedish) both developed by SLU.

With the help of the two pedagogical tools, we want to introduce agricultural pupils to the complexity of food production, as it forces the game player to keep many important societal goals in mind at the same time - food production, self-sufficiency, biodiversity and climate change, as well as conflicts between them.

By combining the pedagogical tools with follow-up exercises, we hope to contribute to a sense that agriculture can be part of the solution to many societal problems.