Taking the sustainable agriculture challenge: recontextualizing rural sociology.

Agroecosystems Analysis (SusAg 509), a required course for all majors in Iowa State University's Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture, provides an immersion experience in the situated challenges of sustainable agriculture. The field portion of SusAg 509, which takes place every year during the first two weeks of August, brings students face-to-face with different understandings of sustainability and the diverse complexity of Midwestern agriculture. Dialogue and reflection turn the raw stuff of experience into learning, as students discover the power and validity of multiple perspectives. More than two dozen site visits help make abstract concepts, such as the economy and social relationships, real. The course succeeds (based on evidence such as capacity enrollments, course evaluations, and program exit interviews) because of its problem-focus and immediacy: it engages the real world, as it is now, not as it has become institutionalized in disciplinary departments. One challenge noted in the call for manuscripts for this special issue on Innovations in Teaching Rural Sociology is meeting student demand for courses and programs in food and agricultural sustainability. In this paper, I address how I am meeting this challenge with a course called Agroecosystems Analysis (henceforth to be referred to by course number). SusAg 509 is required for all majors in Iowa State University's Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (GPSA). It has been offered annually beginning with the first cohort of students in August 2001, following approval of the program by the Iowa Board of Regents. I have co-taught the course for five successive years, beginning in August 2005 and mostly recently in 2009. The course is typically fully enrolled (20 students plus teaching team consisting of two faculty members and one student assistant). The students include graduate majors, minors, nonmajors, the occasional undergraduate, and sometimes guests from other universities in the U.S. and abroad.