**1. Introduction**

The challenges facing food systems today are complex and pressing. Creating a more sustainable food system requires us to work across diverse disciplines, sectors and scales—competencies that are not often the focus of traditional tertiary education programs [1]. Education in this space needs to support learners to build these competencies by acquiring and integrating new knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable successful task performance and problem solving as applied to real-world challenges at the interface of food systems and sustainability [1,2]. Although the overall application of these competencies is of critical importance for graduates of education programs in this space, as faculty we still have an interest in assessing the gain of component parts—namely knowledge, skills and attitudes and how they change as a result of an educational intervention. This information can support us to reflect on the program design and delivery and what participants from di fferent backgrounds are learning.

Much like sustainability education, learning about food systems is complex and the assessment techniques used need to reflect this complexity [3]. This is particularly crucial when assessing knowledge gained as a result of a course. In *How People Learn*, a comprehensive synthesis of research on learning, the authors argue that e ffective learning environments should treat people as individuals, understanding that they have di fferent states of initial knowledge, perceptions, culture, language and sense making processes [4]. Furthermore, knowledge should be considered as an interconnected structure that is continually expanded, organized and refined, and that the learning environment should help people understand this process [5]. How this knowledge is then evoked while solving a particular problem is strongly influenced by an individual's own framing of the situation [5].

This makes assessing the knowledge gained as a result of an educational intervention challenging, particularly when the cohort is diverse in terms of cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. The challenge is similar when trying to gather an understanding of the knowledge and perspectives of multiple actors within a complex problem or issue. Rich pictures (RPs), developed as a part of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), have been used in such situations for many years as a method to analyze a complex situation and define problems with a diverse group of actors [6]. The main developer of SSM, Peter Checkland, describes the approach as follows:

*"Soft systems methodology (SSM) is an approach for tackling problematical, messy situations of all kinds. It is an action-oriented process of inquiry into problematic situations in which users learn their way from finding out about the situation, to taking action to improve it. The learning emerges via an organised process in which the situation is explored using a set of models of purposeful action (each built to encapsulate a single worldview) as intellectual devices, or tools, to inform and structure discussion about a situation and how it might be improved"* [7].

RPs, as one tool within this SSM, were originally developed to structure and frame problems in complex socio-technical systems, for example in development cooperation projects, governmen<sup>t</sup> policy design, information system planning, engineering and health care [6]. RPs are simple in concept—they involve a small group of people collectively drawing a freehand diagram of a particular situation. They are a diagrammatic representation of a perspective of a complex situation that can include objects, ideas, people, feelings, conflicts and prejudices [8]. As outlined by Bell, Berg and Morse [9], RPs are very specific to the people who draw them, reflecting their own ways of thinking and contexts. They thus act as a visual thinking device and a representation of people's perspectives of a situation.

Researchers working with RPs highlight that the value of this method is that it allows complexity to be captured in a way that is concise while still being rich in information [10]. Further, RPs allow elements to be captured that may never emerge in a verbal dialogue, such as spatial information, mood, symbolic meaning, relationships and emotions [11]. On this basis, we explored the potential to adapt this method and apply it within an educational setting that deals with complex systems, namely food systems and sustainability. Although usually applied in a group setting, with each RP drawn by a group of people, we employed the method as a tool for individual reflection of participants. With the exception of an example in *Teaching on Information Systems* from Horan [12], research on the use of RPs in an educational setting as a tool to understand knowledge gained as the result of a course is limited. In the work of Horan [12], the RP method was used as a tool to help people explore their understanding of the subject matter and how they were learning about it. The pictures were developed individually or in pairs and were used as a basis for people to reflect on and manage their own learning experience and to feed group discussions. Although this study was undertaken in the early 2000s, we were not able to identify any other examples of RPs being further evolved or researched in such a setting. Here, we adapted the application of the RP method, namely as a pre- and post-assessment of knowledge about the food system, completed by individual participants at the beginning and end of the course.

As there is no right or wrong depiction of a food system, each person's version of it will be inherently connected to their worldview and experience [7]. Thus, the RP method is useful in this context as it does not capture a description of the "real world" but is simply a device to capture individual perspectives and observe changes of a person´s view. On this basis, we decided to utilize the RP method as a tool to assess how participants' knowledge changes as a result of an educational intervention—in our case, a two-week intensive course on food systems involving diverse participants from a range of disciplines and cultures.

The World Food System Summer School was launched in 2013 to o ffer an innovative approach to training the next generation of food system decision makers. To date, the course has been run seven times in four di fferent countries, training 169 participants, i.e., graduate-level university students and young professionals, from 49 di fferent countries. It has been built around twelve design criteria [13] that aim to make the experience rigorous, meaningful and impactful for the participants. The design criteria include: the promotion of cross-cultural exchange and team work; an awareness of the context specificity of challenges and solutions; the application of systems thinking; interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and values-based approaches; a blend of experience, theory and skill acquisition; an experimental approach to program design; an exploration of agency and power of diverse actors; and the appreciation of participants as producers and users of knowledge. The course is enriched by the inclusion of a diverse participant and faculty cohort and by hosting the experience in unique locations that o ffer first-hand engagemen<sup>t</sup> with food system issues. The entire program is structured around Kolb's theory, outlining learning as a cyclical procedure involving concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization and active experimentation [14].

As course designers, we have a specific interest in understanding, in a systematic way, the knowledge that participants gain during the course. This is challenging given the complex nature of food systems, the necessity to work across di fferent disciplines, with multiple sectors and across di fferent spatial and temporal scales, and the dynamic and diverse learning environment that we deliberately create. Such conditions make it inappropriate to apply a more traditional test with a pre-set list of questions only in written form. For this reason, we decided to conduct a pre- and post-course knowledge test for individual participants using RPs that allows them to individually capture their baseline understanding of the system and then reflect on and communicate how this understanding has changed. The RP tool has two purposes: (1) to provide participants with a structured process to reflect on what they have learned from a content perspective and (2) to support the faculty to understand what participants have learned and feed this back into the development of future courses.

The overall objective of this paper is to assess the e fficacy of the RP as a tool in this context—firstly, as a means to investigate the knowledge gained by participants in the course; secondly, to explore how this information can be used in a reflective process to inform future course design and teaching. We conclude that, despite some limitations, the RP method is a highly valuable and simple tool to gain insight into how participants' knowledge has changed. It is thus also helpful to guide changes to the course or session design, including how other reflection methods are linked to the RP method. We have initial feedback from participants regarding the value of this tool for their own reflection. However, further research is needed to explore in more detail the participant perspectives on the RP method as a tool for their own reflective learning.
