Mansfield food and fibre teacher, Julie Aldous wins Victorian RIRDC Rural Women’s Award

FOR Mansfield food and fibre teacher, Julie Aldous, teaching her students agriculture is more than just her job.

Teachers pet: Julie Aldous with Clare, her Border Collie.

FOR Mansfield food and fibre teacher, Julie Aldous, teaching her students agriculture is more than just her job, it’s her passion.

In 2009, Julie introduced and started teaching her subject ‘Agribusiness - The Mansfield model’ to Year 9 and 10 students at the Mansfield Secondary School.

The model isn’t any regular agriculture subject though.

“The difference with the Mansfield model is that we don’t have a school farm,” says Julie. “We haven’t got cattle, sheep, ducks or chickens.

“Instead we have partnerships with the local community.”

One day a week Julie and her students head to one of the 90 participating farmers and businesses where the students learn by working with an industry professional.

Last month Julie was acknowledged for her award-winning course which creates partnerships between students and rural industry mentors by receiving the Victorian RIRDC Rural Women’s Award with a $10,000 bursary to go towards her proposed project.

Julie hopes to use the bursary to promote her cost-effective and sustainable model and encourage schools that don’t necessarily have the resources to run a school farm to educate their students using her model.

“The aim is to enable schools who don’t currently teach agriculture to do so,” she says. “We work on real farms and that is why it can be adopted by other schools. I have farmers calling up asking to be a part of the model.”

Students visit the farms and businesses in the first half of the year before being allocated to farms for the second half. They gain a TAFE Certificate II in Agriculture for completing the course.