Reimagining Agricultural Advisors and Educators as Agricultural Bricoleurs Towards Enhanced Skills Transfer: An Adult Learning Perspective

T. Teele; M.M. Nkoane

doi:10.17159/2413-3221/2024/v52n3a13288

Authors

T. Teele Central University of Technology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5267-7652
M.M. Nkoane Central University of Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17159/2413-3221/2024/v52n3a13288

Keywords:

Bricoleur, Agricultural Advisors, Skills Transfer, Adult Education, Constructivism, Agricultural Educators

Abstract

Bricolage's approach describes how post-colonial, post-positivist, post-modernist, or post-structuralist paradigms have driven intellectuals to develop mixed multi-theoretical and multi-methodological methods. Bricoleurs must contextualise the approaches using the metaphor and articulate its meaning and inferences for advisory services in attempting to do so, as agricultural advisors as bricoleurs and emerging farmers view themselves as co-advisors, guided by bricolage principles. The bricoleurs, equipped with adult education approaches and emerging farmers, will engage in a skills transfer exercise in an agricultural environment. In contrast, a bricoleur plays the role of a facilitator, not a teacher or an expert. Emerging farmers are knowledgeable, and many have years of experience working in the farming environment and have massive knowledge and experience that they can circulate amongst themselves. Bricolage highlights the relationship between agricultural advisors' ways of seeing and the social location of their personal history. The agricultural advisor-as-bricoleur abandons the quest for the naive concept of realism. It focuses instead on clariﬁcation of their position in the web of reality, the social locations of other co-advisors and the ways they shape the production and interpretation of knowledge. Bricolage tracks significant ruptures in epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political underpinnings that influence agricultural advisors. The record shows that, while traditional agricultural extension services were based on positivist rationalities, successive generations must adopt more interpretive, post-positivist, post-colonial, post-modern, constructivist, and post-structuralist approaches. As a guiding theory for agricultural extension advisors, Bricolage can improve skills transfer amongst emerging farmers by using limited resources to complete specific tasks.

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