As part of the RISE ATTER project, consortium partners co-designed and delivered a 7-day event at Monkton Wyld Court in Dorset, UK. This is the first of three summer/autumn schools planned to take place over the course of the ATTER project. The main objective of this week-long collective space was to bring together researchers and practitioners from across the world who want to exchange, learn and advance their thinking and practice on agroecological transitions. The programme for the school was designed around the ATTER project, itself a community of practice of researchers and practitioners working on ‘agroecological transitions of territorial agrifood systems.’ The Autumn School drew on the expertise of the consortium - built from eighteen universities, research centres and civil society groups from six countries - to offer an exciting and transdisciplinary programme, alongside insights from participants’ experiences throughout the week.

Objectives/vision/intentions

1. Build a ‘community of practice’ relating to participatory action researchers that wish to commit to fostering socially just food systems in their territories.

2. Facilitate exchanges around tools and methodologies intended to support agroecological transitions at the territorial level.

3. Honour and incorporate ‘diverse ways of knowing’ as a key component of agroecological transitions.

4. Create a nurturing and non-judgemental environment so that optimal learning and exchanges can happen.

5. Create a transformative moment for participants grounded in experiential learning.

Pedagogical approach

The school was an attempt to highlight the importance of the diversity of knowledges that exists in territorial food systems. Transition processes affect everybody - even if in highly uneven ways - and for that reason we believe that all perspectives are needed to understand, facilitate and effect them with a particular attention on the most marginalised voices. Moreover, how we view ‘transitions’, ‘territories’ or even ‘agroecology’ will be different depending on who we are and where we are coming from. With this in mind the school explored multiple methods and tools, relevant to a range of scales, that have potential to transcend the subordination of nature and of people along intersectional lines of race, class, caste, disability/ability, sexuality, and gender. Our approach also reflects how we conceive of the learning process in itself. As such, the school was based on the principles of critical and decolonizing pedagogies. Using dialogue, mutual exchange, feminist participatory methodologies, amongst other horizontal approaches, we will organise spaces for sharing ideas, experiences and research, unpacking problems in research, and exploring together the collective experiences and uncertainties of the group, as well as our hopes and dreams for the future.