Systemic praxis in the education of the agricultural systems practitioner<FNR></FNR><FN>Paper first presented at the 1991 annual meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Ostersund, Sweden, and originally published in Systems Practice 1993, 6(1), 7-20. </FN>

This paper describes the context and the systemic experiential theories that have informed the praxis of educating agricultural systems practitioners. The praxis has involved a process of action research with students and with clients in farming and other rural community organizations. The praxis encourages learners to bring a range of methodologies of inquiry to bear upon problematic issues, contingent upon the nature of such issues. Informed by a number of different theories, and by reflecting on our own work, an earlier model of a nested hierarchy of systems of inquiry has been reconstructed to become a more useful guide to educational strategies: Each contingent methodology can now be seen to have its own learning, meta-learning, and epistemic learning dimensions. A key to enriched learning for responsible changes in agriculture and rural development lies in the facilitation of the consciousness of, and competency at, such a systemic pluralism of methodologies. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]