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Commonwealth
Forests | | |
 The modern forestry academic
Concurrent with the changes in the nature of the forestry profession, the background of those
teaching forestry has changed, sometimes to the chagrin of those with more traditional views
of the discipline (Nair 2004; Temu et al.. 2006). Traditionally, it was viewed as a discipline
rooted firmly in the natural sciences. Key contributions to a programme were made by courses
in biology, chemistry, physics and other natural sciences. However, a range of contributions
from the social sciences has been increasingly incorporated. As a result, a teaching unit
dealing with forest management might still contain silviculturalists, neoclassical economists
and biometricians, but these would be augmented by geographers, anthropologists,
psychologists, planners, business managers, hydrologists and engineers. This broadening of
the discipline of forestry has created problems. Many universities now offer a forestry degree
that consists of an amalgam of courses provided by a range of departments and faculties
across the university. Although there are notable exceptions, some such programmes have
little cohesion, may not be accredited by the professional forestry association of the country,
and may lack teaching in some of the basic skills demanded of foresters. This appears to be
the case with many of the programmes offered by British universities. A second problem
associated with forestry’s broadening mandate is that the range of material that a ‘general
forestry practitioner’ is now expected to know is so great that there is little chance of acquiring
this within a three- or four-year degree programme, especially as the first year of many
university programmes is spent trying to remedy some of the deficiencies of the school
system. One possibility may be to move a new system of education, with the required basic
social and/or natural science being offered in a three- or four-year first-degree programme, and
a more specialised knowledge in a particular aspect of forestry being developed in a post-graduate degree.
In Europe, there has already been substantial progress towards two-cycle
degrees, as agreed through the Bologna Process4, and second-cycle degrees, such as the
MSc programmes in Sustainable Tropical Forestry and Sustainable Forest and Nature
Management offered through the European Erasmus Mundus programme5 are heavily over-subscribed
(one Commonwealth university, the University of Wales, is associated with this
exciting initiative).
These problems have also created opportunities. The diversity of knowledge has enabled the
broadening of the expertise in some faculties, encouraging more inter-disciplinary research.
The changing requirements have enabled the more adaptable universities to move forward and
to explore new programme delivery methods such as on-line courses using technologies such
as ‘webct’ and ‘Blackboard’ ( http://www.webct.com
).
A range of new teaching techniques are being explored, and forestry lends itself to some of
these. This in turn has pushed many forestry academics into exploring new technologies and
new areas of research and teaching, to the benefit of all (Nair 2004). However, many of these
new technologies have yet to be exploited to their full potential (Längin et al.. 2004).
4 The Bologna Process of reforms and standardization of European higher education. See
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna_en.html
5 The Erasmus Mundus programme is a co-operation and mobility programme in higher
education, which promotes the European Union as a centre of excellence in learning around
the world. See
http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/mundus/index_en
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