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What can Adult Education academia contribute to women farmer risk management educational efforts?

John Berry

Summary

As increasing numbers of women take up a farming career they seek to meet their educational needs in order to start, maintain, and grow their enterprises. Despite the deep historical success Cooperative Extension enjoys with its audience of predominately men farmers the system may not be meeting the educational needs of this new audience

As we look at the audience of current and potential women farmers, many differences are apparent. Even a relatively small sample of the population reveals a diversity that may involve size, age, ableness, standard-of-living, sexual orientation, culture, ethnicity, and gender. Any one of these attributes may have significant impact on learning. The complexity of understanding how adults make sense of their lived experiences is multiplied by the intersection and interplay of these many attributes specific to any particular individual, or group, and understanding this interaction is not the purpose of this session.

The objective for this session is something around understanding and addressing the educational needs, in a broadly defined way, of women farmers. We will use an Adult Education lens to build the case for the significance of understanding the learning experience of women farmers that use the Cooperative Extension system of educational programming. Session attendees will go away with concepts and tools they can implement immediately in becoming more effective educators. Research based and proven adult education methodology is the focus here.

Details

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