School goes to the farm: conceptualisation of rural-based sustainability education

Summary

'School Goes to the Farm' activities are aimed at promoting socio-cultural sustainability and education for sustainable development (EfSD) by improving knowledge among children and youth about the relationship between nature and culture and about the role of rural areas in the society. This is done by developing local co-operation between schools, farms and the regional nature centres. The experiences show that the local school-farm co-operation is an interesting possibility both for the schools and for the farms. Rural-based EfSD excellently meets the needs of contextual, comprehensive and experiental learing. Farms can be exploited as learning environment in several of the school subjects, and the activity is especially well suited for concretising the goals of the cross-curricular themes. The way the pupils learn in the farm cannot be substituted with learning from books or in the classroom. Complying with the goals of the crossboundary approach of the national curriculum for basic education it is also easily justified with educational arguments. This article captures the background and set-up of a pilot project. The premise of is discussed on the basis of teachers' and pupils' experiences, and a conceptual model of the contextual approach of rural-based EfSD is presented.