Integrating the FEW-Nexus into an Agricultural Issues Course

To address the global challenges facing the agricultural industry, graduates of agricultural degree programs must learn to utilize systems thinking skills, which can help them view the interconnectedness among issues and design holistic solutions. The Food-Energy-Water (FEW)-Nexus is an interdisciplinary framework that can support undergraduate student achievement of sustainability education competencies, including systems thinking. This project utilized the FEW-Nexus framework in an agricultural issues course to help students improve their systems thinking. Students were given lectures on various agricultural issues by experts in those areas. Two assignments, agricultural issue concept maps and critical reflections over each speaker’s session were completed by students. Analysis of these assignments showed that students were able to increase the complexity of their systems thinking. Providing students with a framework to guide their thinking about agricultural issues can be useful. Plans include collecting more data in the agricultural issues course to empirically examine students’ systems thinking skills. Additionally, we plan to integrate more activities using the FEW-Nexus into the course.