Drawing on her teaching experience in Taiwan and the United States, Liann Shannon argues that funding structures and partnership models often signal support without actually sustaining the continuity, collaboration or autonomy that agroecology education needs. Only by protecting long-term relationships, on-the-ground collaboration and trust-building practices can students meaningfully engage in the structural challenges facing rural communities and help shape regenerative social, economic and cultural systems.
Agroecology education lacks continuity, collaboration and autonomy
In Taiwan, a densely populated island society in the Asia-Pacific region with steep mountain ranges and limited arable land, questions about food self-sufficiency are increasingly raised – not only in educational circles but also in the spheres of public health, the environment and beyond.
In 2022, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture introduced the Food and Agricultural Education (FAE) Act to promote food systems learning and collaboration between schools, communities, agricultural sectors, local governments and academic experts. Its vision is to sustainably develop agricultural and fishing villages while cultivating talent in food systems. However, as FAE now moves from policy into practice, community engagement and interdisciplinary learning remain fragmented.
This happens for three main reasons: short-term accountability cycles disrupt continuity before trust can accumulate; partnerships lack active collaboration; and unclear permission structures stifle autonomy and make experimentation feel too risky. As students, teachers and practitioners, we face these challenges in our learning spaces. During my teaching experience in Taiwan, I have seen how current funding mechanisms, partnership models, and governance logics in education are not sufficient to sustain agroecology education. As a result, students often learn about food systems without receiving support required to meaningfully engage in them.
Continuity: Timelines, relationships and memory
Students can’t truly engage with local food systems if their learning environments repeatedly reset before they’ve built trust, skills and responsibility. A lack of continuity in education programmes exposes the structural gap between the democratic food transition envisioned by Taiwan’s Ministry of Agriculture and its Ministry of Education and the actual opportunities available to Taiwan’s youth to participate in their local food systems.
In Taiwan, many education programmes are required to ‘reset’ at the end of each short reporting period, with a focus on policy changes rather than building on prior work. Even so-called ‘multi-year’ programmes often operate as a series of one-year grants, with no guarantee of ongoing funding after approval. These brief funding cycles make it difficult to develop the ongoing reflection, organisational learning and trusting relationships that underpin community-based education.
Continuity is treated as infrastructure; in addition to extending timelines, it is about preserving relationships and institutional memory
Most grants are tied to fiscal years rather than academic calendars, encouraging quick, visible results like videos, basic platforms or AI-generated content rather than addressing deeper educational or community needs. Many projects serve as stepping stones toward securing subsequent funding, rather than focusing on long-term goals. Efforts that can’t be measured within a single grant period – such as relationship-building or community research – are often overlooked.
At the end of these cycles, projects are rarely formally closed and are more often quietly deprioritised when the institutional spotlight shifts elsewhere. Resources do not flow back into previously completed work. One colleague described this approach to me as watering a desert with a garden hose: hoping that something can survive on sunshine, air and love until it can once again be connected to a broader network.
In practice, this means systems-building becomes an act of juggling and individual endurance. The practitioner community is spread thin, and young talent burns out quickly. Mentors disappear mid-project. Field sites dissolve between cohorts. Structural questions are abandoned just as learners begin to understand their stakes. Although students may learn about food systems, their entry into them is rarely supported in sustained or consequential ways.
A contrasting model already exists within Taiwan’s policy landscape. The Rural Youth Return Programme, led by the Ministry of Agriculture’s Agency of Rural Development and Soil and Water Conservation, organises low-barrier funding around grant families and thematic clusters, allowing initiatives to operate within a longer developmental framework. Since 2017, this structure has helped youth-led projects iterate, mature and transfer learning across cycles without requiring artificial reinvention at each funding boundary.
Continuity plans are assessed alongside social impact, with greater emphasis placed on long-term feasibility than on immediate scale or ambition. Consultants work closely with grantees to refine business and implementation plans, with the expectation that, by the end of the multi-year term, projects will be able to sustain themselves beyond grant funding. Some of the agroecology education initiatives arising from this programme are available here.
What distinguishes this model is its underlying assumption that learning unfolds unevenly and cannot be rushed. Continuity is treated as infrastructure; in addition to extending timelines, it is about preserving relationships and institutional memory long enough for collaboration to become meaningful.
Collaboration: Logistical support, paradigms and conflict resolution
Official partnerships are not always based on true collaboration. Students are usually normalised to classrooms that do not communicate with one another and schools that do not engage with their communities. In a generation dominated by screen-based interactions, one might imagine that students would be content within these silos. However, open-ended survey feedback from 12th graders and university students collected over three years in Eastern Taiwan consistently emphasised the need for community-based primary research, ongoing field engagement rather than single-site visits, and authentic audiences beyond the classroom. Students want their learning to make an impact.
On paper, the FAE Act envisions collaboration among schools, communities, civic organisations and government agencies to extend learning beyond the classroom. However, school initiatives currently lack such coordination, and local food systems remain underutilised. In the words of food systems scholar Dr. Timothy Seekings, we’re bringing the food system into the curriculum when we should be bringing the curriculum into the food system. Changing this would require organisations to champion community-centred learning grounded in relationships, rather than student-centred models narrowly focused on portfolios, deliverables or even community service metrics. Whether this kind of collaboration takes root depends on three interrelated conditions: logistical support, shared paradigms and the capacity to navigate disagreement.
Regarding logistical support, the labour of initiating, formalising and maintaining community-level collaboration is often placed on individual teachers or project leads. Additionally, while Taiwan has made meaningful progress integrating FAE into its sustainability discourse, many educators feel underprepared to teach agroecology as a systems-based, place-based practice. Without organisation-level involvement and collective commitment (including professional guidance and relational infrastructure) to support this labour, collaboration becomes an optional, unevenly distributed burden that depends on individual goodwill.
In a conflict-averse society such as Taiwan, what does collaboration entail? Which conversations need to be sustained, and with whom?
Collaboration is also shaped by our underlying food paradigms. To date, FAE implementation has been disproportionately oriented towards standalone paradigms in food literacy (health and nutrition), food heritage (diet and tradition), or food systems (sustainability and supply chains). When these paradigms are taught in isolation, civic literacy tends towards a checkbox approach rather than instigating justice or change. The challenge is to weave these strands into a historically informed discussion on food sovereignty. Expanded food paradigms mean expanded forms of participation.
Decision making may also be guided by conflict aversion. For example, collaboration can be reduced to making the most informed decisions for communities rather than with them, reinforced by the use of AI and Large Language Models to infer local needs. There is also a persistent divide-and-conquer approach to teamwork that reduces collaboration to the mere delegation of tasks, bypassing the slower, relational work of disagreeing and reaching agreement in person.
In a collective, conflict-averse society such as Taiwan, what does collaboration entail? Which conversations need to be sustained, and with whom? Tools and discussions will need to explicitly reframe collaboration as navigating through conflict rather than around it. As much as continuity depends on time and shared memory, collaboration depends on conditions that allow people to work, decide and disagree together.
Autonomy: Permission, risk and trust
Since Taiwan’s mass student-led demonstration for education reform in 1994, its educational policies have increasingly emphasised individualised, problem-based and non-authoritarian learning. A push and pull continues between the kinds of permission teachers and students have technically been given to innovate, and how far they’ve realistically been able to lean into these spaces. As with collaboration, the challenge with autonomy in Taiwan’s agroecology education landscape isn’t a lack of policy endorsement; it concerns uncertainty about how far that endorsement extends.
Hierarchical classrooms provide clarity and comparability, fueling competition that consistently places Taiwan’s student academic performance among the highest in the world. This top-down infrastructure often impedes the iterative experimentation (and failure) needed for students to learn critical, adaptive problem solving.
Unclear boundaries ultimately mean that students are given little room by teachers to move effectively, and the same top-down constraints apply between teachers and school administrators, as well as between schools and the government. I’ve seen this at work in multiple schools: out-of-the-box thinking really means slightly bigger-box thinking, with the message to innovators being to stretch the mould, not break it. One colleague recounted a full-fledged gardening programme on a campus that was dissolved when parents objected that their children were “too good” for farm work. Experimental education here refers to playing the violin and programming AI, he explained. In a competitive educational environment, with children’s futures and school reputations at stake, risk management often takes precedence. An agroecology education, then, is an impressive collaboration long before community partners enter the picture. It begins as a three-legged sack race that requires educating teachers, administrators and parents in their respective languages just to get across the starting line.
Furthermore, new conflicting values and norms continue to emerge from the modern industrial complex, globalised cultures, and technologically driven progress. They trickle down to how a society makes sense of the classroom space; what the school wants to see in the curriculum, what the parent wants to see in the gradebook, and what the teacher feels justified in making time for. It requires conversations about how to align these values. My colleagues also emphasise to me the power of working top-down and bottom-up simultaneously, understanding how authority flows within each institution, and working with, rather than against, it. “Face, authority, age, status… if you don’t work within that system here, it doesn’t work”, one colleague says.
When it comes to building autonomy, the Rural Youth Return Programme mentioned above starts by setting the tone for how it tolerates uncertainty. Rather than treating irregularities as failures, the programme assumes that projects will evolve as young practitioners learn what their communities actually need. Funding is structured to support iteration, not perfection, and grantees are encouraged to build livelihoods rather than just deliverables.
In short, autonomy develops when continuity fosters trust, and collaboration distributes responsibility across organisations rather than individuals. When continuity, collaboration, and autonomy align, educational innovation shifts from isolated experimentation to collective capacity-building, and students shift from merely studying food systems to helping shape them.
Conclusion: Translation, temporality and relationality
Despite Taiwan’s policy support and institutional language, the pace, relationality and permission structures for agroecological learning to take deeper root are lacking. These bottlenecks of continuity, collaboration and autonomy are not isolated problems; they reinforce one another across Taiwan’s formal and informal learning spaces.
With FAE already established in public discourse, the challenge ahead is to transform Taiwan’s predominantly rural realities into place-based learning systems. This requires organisations not to move faster, but to stay longer; aligning calendars with relational and ecological rhythms, policy timelines with community processes, and educational success with forms of local knowledge that cannot be rushed into quarterly outputs.
If agroecology and regenerative land management teaches us anything, it’s that resilience is cultivated through patience and reciprocity. Regenerative learning must follow the same logic. It restores intuition that standardisation has flattened, reveals complexity where efficiency has simplified, and reclaims beauty, joy, and creativity as legitimate foundations of knowledge rather than extracurricular luxuries.
The role of the teacher shifts toward something more durable – creating the conditions for students to learn in relation to land and people. What is being passed on, then, is not just information but a way of knowing capable of outlasting rapid content cycles and the cascading effects of technological change. This is how resilience is built: by allowing the next generation to steward what is already theirs and by designing learning systems to facilitate that handover.
Author: Liann Shannon (30) is a Taiwanese-American who completed her K-16 schooling (kindergarten to university) in the U.S. before moving to Taiwan where she teaches K-16 courses and workshops. She currently leads TaiwanGROWS, a community resilience studio in Hualien, Taiwan focused on agroecology education and regenerative agritourism. Contact: liannshannon@gmail.com
This article is part of Issue 4-2026: Youth leading the way in agroecology.
