Our approach to curriculum development

  • ANAU student needs assessment (Photo: Sos Avetisyan)

We aim at creating a curriculum that prepares students for complex, real world challenges and situations. To do so, we believe in a transdisciplinary and systemic curriculum that combines theory and practice. This ensures that the learning process not only happens inside the classroom, but also outside, through hands-on activities that approach real-life situations particularly involving meaningful partnerships between stakeholders and students and lecturers.

Currently, within our process of curriculum development we are also in the middle of defining our main teaching philosophy and approaches. For that, together with other members of the working group, we are preparing a teaching philosophy manual that will be used as base for discussion during our project meetings both in Vienna in May and Yerevan in September. The manual builds on a wide-range of methods and approaches, which can be applied in the field of sustainable farming in higher education.

Parallel to this we are also working to define the content of our curriculum. For that, we are currently engaged in discussions about the content of the main modules. Particularly we are focusing on meaningful engagement of stakeholders and long-lasting partnerships between them. We are doing this process as participatory as possible, trying to engage all relevant stakeholders, so that their needs and expectations are taken into account. In order to do so we have created a stakeholder steering committee that is active in giving feedback and participating in our curriculum develop.  This allows for co-ownership of the program and ideally an invested responsibility in the program after the project—dealing ealing with development and initiation of the program—is over to further the quality and sustainability of the program.

We are interested in collaborations and learning about new methods and benefits and challenges of older methods as well as participatory curriculum development experiences.  Please feel free to contact us to share experiences.