Olaf Keser-Wagner
The content on this page was translated automatically.
Farm education the other way around
Olaf in Witzenhausen
Before coming to Witzenhausen, I had gone through a few other learning beginnings. From the desire to become a doctor for people, I came to the doctor on the earth with the desire to study organic agriculture. Via a detour to Bonn, my path led me to Witzenhausen. There I experienced a learning culture and a culture of participation by the students, which excited me very much. As chairman of LöLa e.V. (Association for the Promotion of Teaching in Organic Agriculture), I campaigned for the further development of the location. At that time, the state of Hesse threatened to close the site, and we students developed concepts that ultimately led to the conversion of the entire site to organic farming.
Olaf Keser-Wagner - Dipl. in Agricultural Economics with focus on organic farming, graduated in 1999.
Currently: self-employed evocator, lecturer and author in non-profit organizations as well as in global corporations.
In great memory for me are still the organization of the foreign excursion to Italy, the realization of a workshop on learning forms, the conversion project with the first BSE cattle in Germany three weeks before submission and the development of a memory game to design the review of one of the four focus blocks. In the context of the vocational practical studies I was allowed to accompany the educational work on the Adolphshof estate and various other social forms in agriculture had caught my attention: Even then, my attention was very much focused on the question of how we learn with each other and how a healthy togetherness can emerge from this.
What happened next?
After graduating in spring 1999, I moved to Wiesbaden to the Freudenberg Castle and Museum. As area manager for the outdoor area, I had the best teachers for managers: as part of the Immediate Action Program, I had ten jobs for unemployed young people who were to be made fit for the primary labor market through landscape maintenance. About a year after I started, I was called into management and from there helped shape the fortunes of the company as a whole. My focus was now on the doctor in the social sector.
In 2006 I said goodbye to this exciting "field of experience for the development of the senses and thinking" and started my solo self-employment. A little later I was approached with the wish to develop offers for pupils that would bring about a real interest in agriculture. This is how the association Erfahrungsfeld-Bauernhof e.V. came into being, which I have chaired since its foundation in 2009. This association is the connection to agriculture that has remained with me. More or less on a voluntary basis, we have managed to develop a different farm pedagogy, about which I have written two books and for which I now also offer an online course. In the meantime, I have also been able to present this approach again and again in Witzenhausen as a lecturer in environmental communication and make it tangible.
I was able to "ground" the methods I use with all my clients and customers (evocative leadership and consulting) during the many encounters with people in agriculture. As before, the Experiential Farm is a proving ground for learning spaces with a great sensitivity to healing a socially dysfunctional relationship. A podcast launched in 2020 in the fall brings me into fortnightly conversation with people doing farm education in a variety of ways.
Grateful I am ...
... Witzenhausen for its willingness to welcome students who want to change something, to create opportunities to try out learning formats, to practice and thereby to further develop agriculture also in the social forms. What nowadays as Design-Thinking, Theory U or Liberatings Structures is methodical know-how for facilitators, we could already live and try out in Witzenhausen more than 20 years ago.