International Course 2021 > Organization

Course structure

The course will take place in Tunisia and will be implemented in two stages.

First, on a one-on-one online basis, and second, in face-to-face attendance of participants but with virtual interventions of most speakers and local coaching. For the in-person (attended) section of the course, a facilitator will be present on the premises in order to manage organizational matters and especially to co-facilitate group work activities as much as possible.

The number of attendees is limited to 20-25, selected from a variety of different disciplines such as agronomy, agro-economy, geography. All attendees will have to be involved in the field of agriculture as either young researchers or doctoral students. Agricultural consultants and advisors will also be considered for participation. Priority will be given for the PhD students and young researchers who have already submitted an abstract to the FSD7 2022 symposium or intend to do it in March 2021.

Structure of the face-to-face course

The course will take place over a period of 4 days, and each day a specific topic in connection with the course objective of the training will be presented. We distinguish three types of intervention/activity within the course. 

• Webinar sessions:  Given the global status with the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest FSD2021 scientific committee meeting decided to postpone the organization of the symposium to March 2022. The scientific committee instead agreed on organizing a series of short and interactive webinars from 22nd to 25th of March 2021. In this context, we agreed to combine the organization of these webinars with that of the current proposed international course.
  4 webinars are planned of duration of 2h each per day.

• 1 hour to 1h15 long interventions. This type of intervention will systematically consist of 3 parts: a 20-25 minutes (maximum) review of a concept or method. 10-15 minutes to set the objectives of a debate around the question raised in the presentation, and finally a 20-25 minutes debate with the participants. In any case we encourage relatively short presentations.
   
• Group work based on a case study and specific analytical framework. This work will revolve around three essential stages :
  - presentation of an analytical framework for evaluating the performance of an agricultural system (at farm or territory level);
  - presentation of a case study showing the operationality of a method and emphasizing the issues relating to questions of design or strategic production choices in dryland environments;
  - group work that will use the analytical framework with a view to assessing the performance of an agricultural system based on the case study and its challenges.

Contact: fsd7-course@sciencesconf.org