Olaf Keser-Wagner

I still have fond memories of organizing the excursion abroad to Italy, conducting a workshop on forms of learning, the conversion project with the first BSE cattle in Germany three weeks before submission and developing a memory game to look back on one of the four focus blocks. As part of my practical vocational studies, I was able to accompany the educational work on the Adolphshof estate and various other social forms in agriculture caught my attention: Even then, my focus was very much on the question of how we learn together and how this can lead to healthy coexistence.

After graduating in spring 1999, I moved to Wiesbaden to work at Freudenberg Castle and Museum. As head of 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 job market through landscape conservation. About a year after I started, I was appointed to the management team and from there I 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 own business. Shortly afterwards, I was asked to develop activities for schoolchildren that would generate a real interest in agriculture. This gave rise to the Erfahrungsfeld-Bauernhof e.V. association, which I have chaired since it was founded 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 kind of farm education, 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 bring it to life.

I have been able to "ground" the methods I use with all my customers and clients (evocative leadership and consulting) in my many encounters with people in agriculture. The Erfahrungsfeld-Bauernhof continues to be a testing ground for learning spaces with a great sensitivity for healing a socially dysfunctional relationship. A podcast, which started in the fall of 2020, brings me into conversation every 14 days with people who practice farm education in a variety of ways.

... Witzenhausen for its willingness to welcome students who want to change something, to create opportunities to try out learning formats, to practise and to further develop agriculture in social forms. What today is methodological know-how for facilitators in the form of Design Thinking, Theory U or Liberating Structures, we were able to live and try out in Witzenhausen over 20 years ago.