Didactic intervention : a concept to enable advisors’collectives to develop skills to support a transition towards agroecology

Our goal is to explain how and along which paths, farmer’s advisors may reflexively be engaged in changing their routines and develop new skills in the context of agro-ecological transition. We analyze a workplace device facilitated by advisors who, in agreement with their hierarchy, monitored a process which could lead to a renewal of advisory practices and to skill development. Skills were only roughly identified: (i) developing new advisory patterns to enhance farmer capacity regarding systemic and long-term reasoning of sustainable field management, (ii) becoming reflexive by learning to self-elicit and debate on our own practices. Twice a year during three years, the facilitators designed a participatory framework to engage and support their peers in sharing their experiences and renewing their practices. We equipped them with some “tools”: a guide called “Agroseil” to support self-elicitation and debates regarding work situations and the way to improve their handling; a “job poster” which enables to remind changes in the way to perform the job; “step-out- situations” which are created to change the perspective on a given advisory pattern and collectively debrief on lessons learned; “cross-observation” during real work situations.Our analysis will first point out the challenges faced by the facilitator in taking a new role among their peers and within their organization. Second it will acknowledge advisors’ paths and show that also they started to perform their work differently they still struggle to address long-term and multiscale issues with farmers. We will conclude by pointing that firm managers need to be involved not only to give a hierarchical support, but also to increment the feed-backs within the organization