Facilitating competency development in sustainable agriculture and food systems education: a self-assessment approach

The need to develop students’ professional and personal competencies via sustainable agriculture and food systems education has recently received much attention; however, implementing competency-based education is challenging. This paper demonstrates how educators can approach identifying and teaching foundational competencies and assessing their students’ competency development. Using the case of a Food Systems class in an undergraduate Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems major at a US land-grant university, we discuss the philosophical and practical aspects of implementing competency-based education and analyse data from students’ use of a competency self-assessment framework in 2009 and 2010. We demonstrate specific analyses that instructors can use for assessing competency development in other contexts. The analysis and results from the case, discussed in depth, demonstrate that the use of these types of competency-based frameworks provides rich opportunities for multiple analyses that can connect teaching practices to specific learning outcomes and objectives. The resulting detailed dataset allows for focused improvements of teaching practice, from specific elements to entire courses. More broadly, we conclude that competency self-assessments serve several important purposes, including communication of a commitment to learner-centred teaching, instructors’ accountability to their own goals and articulation with other parts of the curriculum.