Trip Report. New Paradigm for Discovery-Based Learning: Implementing Bottom-up Development by Listening to Farmers' Needs Using Participatory Processes and Holistic Thinking

Abstract

I spent 30 days in the USA mentoring and advising students with their specific projects, which are initiated to help and assist people in need in Mali and in other parts of the world using participatory processes and holistic ways of thinking. To fulfill this mission, I worked intensively with many people such as Dr Florence Dunkel, the Principal Investigator of Mali projects affiliated with Montana State University (MSU), Dr Ada Giusti, French professor at MSU, Dr Cliff Montagne, MSU soil scientist and specialist in Holistic Management. I worked on peer-refereed manuscripts with these faculty and a graduate student. I mentored students in Dr Florence Dunkel’s PSPP 465 R class, a University Research Core course in Health, Agriculture, and Poverty: Concepts and Action Research. Dr. Dunkel is being assisted in teaching this class by Dr. Ada Giusti. I gave a presentation to Dr Giusti’s French Language class. I met with students of Dr. Dunkel’s BIOO 162 CS Insects and Human Societies course, each large group meeting, each laboratory, and conducted many individual interviews. At Belgrade Middle School, I also made a presentation and answered questions from 60 students in Denise Dahl’s Social Studies class. Denise Dahl is a former USDA Mali exchange teacher. I also interacted with elders, current faculty and students at Chief Dull Knife College, and former Mali externs on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Lame Deer, MT. I made a presentation on Mali in an MSU International Studies class that covered the geography, population, economy, and the cultural identity of Mali. I worked intensively in all cultural aspects of the typical Malian village and Bambara language training with an undergraduate student who is going to Mali this June to help with a project that contributes to overcoming the ravages of kwashiorkor in children in Sanambele, a subsistence farming village in Mali of about 1,200 Bambara-speaking people. I contributed to individual students, and to students in small and large groups, in general mentoring of the PSPP 465 students working on projects concerning Mali, and I will continue mentoring in a continuing, ongoing process via e-mail and Skype. Various discussions took place with these students who are willing to put in practice the participatory processes and holistic thinking for the solutions to problems of the materially-poor but culturally-rich subsistence farmers throughout the world.