Back to the future : reflections from Hawkesbury

Abstract

Systemic development is based on the logic that people can learn to be systemic, and that our efforts to effect changes in our external environment both reflect and influence changes in our 'minds and hearts'. The authors' experience of learning to be systemic is traced through an account of developments at the University of Western Sydney Hawkesbury. Their focus during the 1970s and 1980s was on reform of the agriculture curricula to produce graduates able to play a leadership role in addressing the declining situation in agricultural industries and rural communities. Central to this was the interplay between systems thinking and experiential teaming, learning concepts, educational practice, and institutional expectations and inertia. Arenas encountered included competency-based education, cognitive development, the nature of systemicity, and research and development methodologies. Emerging from this was the notion of systemic praxis and the links of insights and cognition through the Critical Learning System