PRODUCTION HORTICULTURE: A DOOKIE CAMPUS PERSPECTIVE

Production horticulture needs well-educated employees to fill management roles.
Vocationally focussed training courses are valuable for new entrants into this labour intensive industry.
Flexibility allows individuals to participate more readily and establish new, or update older skills.
However, these courses do not provide the opportunity to study the science of the plant production systems that underpin them or to provide more of the “why” rather than the “how”. While University based degree courses do educate students in the sciences, many of these courses are designed from within individual scientific disciplines and lack the vital step of to apply the science to particular production systems.
They are also fairly inflexible in the way they are taught making participation other than as a full-time student difficult.
The challenge in horticultural education is to provide viable courses that are presented in an accessible way and contain the applied scientific knowledge underpinning the production technologies involved.

IV International Symposium on Horticultural Education, Extension and Training

J.R. Wellman

course structure, skills, knowledge

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2005.672.46