The five day course, "Cross-cultural Perspectives in Agricultural Labor: Learning Through Listening," focuses on the learning process through Social Action Research. The goals are to draw people from diverse backgrounds together to learn about cultural perspectives through listening, analysis, and collaboration. The students develop these skills through action learning principals. The course embodies a non-traditional approach to learning, whereby students explore multicultural issues in Agricultural labor in the community of Independence, Oregon.

The learning takes place in an environment that "blurs boundaries" between the teacher-student and community-researcher relationships. The stakeholders include:

• a grower
• church officials
• housing officials
• educators
• health providers
• migrant workers
• labor union representatives.

Through intense listening these students gain an understanding of the complexities of the issues and concerns of the stakeholders. They then re-evaluate their understanding of the topic based on the feedback from the stakeholders. This procedure is complex but contributes to the understanding of issues presented from different social and cultural perspectives. Students are trained in intensive listening, mind mapping and facilitation. These techniques help them organize information gathering while interviewing stakeholders or formulating questions for the interviews. Mind mapping will help to visually configure abstract thought, so that the listeners can see connections between the "parts" and how they come together to form a complex array of social, economic, and personal human interactions. These learning methods subscribe to the notion of a "University without walls." This learning process is introduced to you in the following pages.