Università Roma Tre

The module seeks to provide a broad understanding of rural development (RD) and its relevance in relation to Agenda 2030, illustratedby‘good practice’ examples. The sharing of lessons learned from projectsand programmes, and from policy implementation, provides a “practical” perspective. Reviewing the last few decades of experiences in RD leading to the current state-of-the-art in termsof conceptual approaches, this module also aimstoenhance students’ own critical thinking, thus challenging some of the ‘conventionalwisdom’, and what are often referred to as ‘the givens’. The latter are part of the institutional environment of RD, which will be taken apart and recontextualized to tease out certainenabling and less enabling elements.Furthermore, underlying the module is a quest to understand students’ expectations, to mobilize students’ownexperiencein RD and related fields, and to set aside a window of time for topics to be flagged by students.