Hiram Larew

Putting It Together: The Way Forward**With contributions from Cameron Ehrlich and Jordan Richards.

This chapter helps the reader put together all the innovative, somewhat radical ideas that were laid out in the previous chapters. We suspect, certainly hope, that readers had a cognitive dissonance during the process. This is positive. Recognizing one’s cognitive dissonance provides an opportunity for learning to take place, and we support your journey. As you close the book, we want to be perfectly clear what you can do right now to incorporate the 11 concepts and associated skills illustrated in this book into your daily work, be it research, teaching, policy-making, outreach, and/or other forms of leadership. We have proposed some basic tools that have worked for us: recognize and understand one’s own culture; be open to failure and how to learn from it; decolonize personal interactions (use language of those with whom you work and live); strive to have an ethnorelative worldview; use the holistic process in one’s own life, and facilitate its use in learning and sharing in a community; value immersion experiences; listen to Indigenous peoples; listen across power lines; instructors, listen to students, students listen to each other; listen across campus; include Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the doing of Native Science as an important basis and on-going process. These are the basic components of a comprehensively and inclusively internationalized university of college or other educational or policy-making unit, one that can recognize and incorporate cultures “role in the food and agricultural sciences.”This chapter helps the reader put together all the innovative, somewhat radical ideas that were laid out in the previous chapters. We suspect, certainly hope, that readers had a cognitive dissonance during the process. This is positive. Recognizing one’s cognitive dissonance provides an opportunity for learning to take place, and we support your journey. As you close the book, we want to be perfectly clear what you can do right now to incorporate the 11 concepts and associated skills illustrated in this book into your daily work, be it research, teaching, policy-making, outreach, and/or other forms of leadership. We have proposed some basic tools that have worked for us: recognize and understand one’s own culture; be open to failure and how to learn from it; decolonize personal interactions (use language of those with whom you work and live); strive to have an ethnorelative worldview; use the holistic process in one’s own life, and facilitate its use in learning and sharing in a community; value immersion experiences; listen to Indigenous peoples; listen across power lines; instructors, listen to students, students listen to each other; listen across campus; include Traditional Ecological Knowledge and the doing of Native Science as an important basis and on-going process. These are the basic components of a comprehensively and inclusively internationalized university of college or other educational or policy-making unit, one that can recognize and incorporate cultures “role in the food and agricultural sciences.”

Listening Over Power Lines: Students and Policy Leaders

This chapter explores how a rarely used channel in agricultural classrooms—one linking students to policy leaders—can significantly benefit both groups through a two-way flow of knowledge and ideas. Establishing and then building such “power line” connections between grass roots and grass tops is proving powerful in promoting mutual learning—learning that can occur when students are given the chance to interact with leaders who typically are older, not on campus, and are variously experienced with and responsible for guiding programs that are relevant to classroom discussions. And while it may sound pat, it is surely true: The complexity of opportunities and challenges of current and future food security requires listening across such disparate stakeholder communities. Such bridges are first-step requisites to problem solving.