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October 2004
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CommentariesScholarship: Shout About ItKeith L. Smith, Good Work Is Not EnoughIt's time to shout about your accomplishments. Extension professionals can no longer just "do good work." Our supporters and funding resources demand more from us, in terms of reach, relevance, and efficiency. Land-grant universities need our leadership as they embrace the concept of engagement. We need to more thoroughly adopt a long-recognized and accepted method of "shouting about our work" in university circles: scholarship. Scholarship can be defined in a number of ways. Boyer (1990) identified the steps as Discovery, Integration, Application and Teaching in Scholarship Reconsidered. Elements of scholarship in the Boyer model that particularly relate to Extension include:
As Boyer taught, scholarship is not just about publishing or presenting. It's about engagement and sharing with colleagues. It's about raising the bar and going beyond simply delivering a good program to local clientele. Delivering a successful, targeted program in a county can help hundreds or possibly thousands of local clientele. Now it is our responsibility to take that program and make it national by sharing our success with countless others. One approach to doing this could be a JOE article. What a great benefit to society and taxpayers. What a great benefit to the nationwide network of Extension services. Examples of Extension ScholarshipWe can all think of great examples of scholarship in Extension, or of when a great concept has been shared and then adopted nationwide. One that comes to mind is a collaborative effort among Lydia Medeiros from Ohio State University, Virginia Hillers of Washington State University, and Patricia Kendall of Colorado State University. This team came together and developed a project to improve food safety education. The information distributed has since become the national standard for the safe handling and preparation of foods. Another example comes from Sue Donaldson at the University of Nevada, who developed a wide-reaching curriculum for agricultural educators focused on growing plants and animals on small-acreage farms in areas of environmental sensitivity. In its beginning stage, the project trained 50 educators in eight western states, and since that time Sue has sent out over 900 CD-ROMs of the program to various locations throughout the country. A third example is that of Mike Boehm, an Ohio State University Extension and Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center faculty member, who was assigned to the Biological Defense Research Directorate at the Naval Medical Research Center while serving on active duty. He and his team were responsible for the development and implementation of biological weapons (BW) detection, testing, and training effort for forward-deployed Navy units. By the end of his tour of duty, Boehm's team had reached every Navy unit, ship or shore, that had the potential for action in the Gulf to train them to use tests meant for routine air screening and other suspicious samples. Larger ships were also trained on DNA testing, among other, more sophisticated testing. Numbers Aren't Enough, EitherNobody's better than Extension professionals at developing and implementing strong programs. We do, however, need to improve in how we evaluate and share our successes. We need to think of scholarship in terms of documenting quality. Glassick, Maeroff, and Huber's (1997) book Scholarship Assessed challenges us to look not at how many publications written or how many presentations delivered, but at the characteristics of quality work and how it is documented. Scholarship demands that we evaluate our work. First, we must clearly identify the needs of the people we serve. Once our programming is in place, evaluation is imperative to determine if we've reached the needs, or if additional thought should be given to how we're approaching the issue. Once evaluations show what we're doing is meeting the needs of our clientele and that we're successful, it's time to shout! Shouting About ItWe must define Extension work and university engagement as a part of the core of the university. Engagement is about teaching, research, and service. It is that aspect of the trilogy where the walls of the campus are invisible. As universities grapple to adopt engagement as a key goal, Extension has a clear role in the process through scholarship. And who is more experienced and developed in engagement than Extension? When we define our work in the same terms as other faculty across campus, we are seen as equal partners. This can be accomplished through scholarship. In doing so, we provide a network for "closet" Extension people in other colleges, those who are Extension people at heart. Thus, Extension helps to elevate the university's ability to engage with the community in a broader way. If Extension is going to be a part of the university engagement movement, we must embrace, exemplify, and advocate for teamwork. By partnering across campus, we can meet local community needs more effectively, maximize our impact in communities, and expand our scholarship opportunities. The richness of programming and depth of thought expands when you bring disciplines together. All parties learn and grow from the experience. As more colleges in our universities expand their engagement efforts, they need to see Extension as a partner. They can learn from us, and we can learn from them. Many of these colleges have long histories of community involvement and social activism. Their perspective can enrich what we do. That's a fundamental aspect of scholarship. As an example, the College of the Arts at OSU has a long history of engaging with the community through performances and visual arts exhibits. These performances and exhibits provide a valuable learning experience for students, enhance the arts opportunities for citizens, and serve to foster thought, learning, and expression in the community. The College of Arts' involvement in teacher workshops and industrial partnerships (focused on design) affect selected communities and enhance the quality of their on-campus efforts. By combining the College of the Arts' commitment for community involvement and their knowledge of the arts with Extension's integration into local communities and awareness of local needs, the potential for affecting even more communities is broadly enhanced. By working together, we can enrich the opportunities for youth to engage in the arts through new types of 4-H programs. Through our community development work, we can help villages and towns develop sustainable strategic plans, and by partnering with College of the Arts, we can assist these communities in implementing efforts that focus on enhancing the arts aspect of their community. Scholarship Challenges
The Journal of Extension provides all of us with a tool to embrace scholarship. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of JOE going electronic and the 40th anniversary of this peer-reviewed journal's start, make this the year that you embrace scholarship in the fullest sense of the word. Share your work. You owe it to your colleagues. View reader comments for this Commentary in the JOE Discussion Forum. (This forum is no longer accepting new entries.) ReferencesBoyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Special report. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T., & Maeroff, G. I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Integrating Ecology and Relating Natural Systems to Agriculture: An Increased Priority for Extension Agricultural ProgrammingKyle Cecil Society now provides input into issues associated with environmental sustainability in a myriad of industries, including agriculture. Agriculture today exists within a system that encompasses both biological and societal concerns. This is quite different than what the first agriculture agents dealt with in 1914. Extension must now begin to modify its historical educational emphasis from one addressing primarily the production of food to one that addresses the production of food in a system encompassing both the individual's, society's, and environmental goals. Developing farm operators' knowledge and awareness of relationships between farming and natural systems functioning should be an underlying theme of Extension programming in the new century. An agricultural system that can produce not only plentiful, healthful food, but also fully functioning ecosystems should be a goal of Extension outreach and programming efforts. The Changing Context of Agricultural ExtensionExtension has focused its educational efforts on an anthropocentric agricultural production system. That is to say, Extension has historically assisted the farmer in developing farming systems that maximized food production in order to feed a growing population. The focus on production of mass-produced staple commodities has unfortunately brought with it a number of consequences that society now views as unacceptable. These include:
By no means is it implied that agriculture is the only contributor to environmental problems facing today's society. Rural and urban populations each contribute to environmental problems in their own unique way. Agriculture, however, by simple virtue of the amount of land in the world utilized for production of food products, plays a significant role in sustainability of the environment. The fact is, farmers have a major impact on environmental sustainability. Given this long tradition of agriculture-based Extension nationwide, many Extension educators may have a strictly agricultural production background and are perhaps not trained in natural resources management or ecology. Due to the complexities of environmental systems, it is unlikely that an educator with a limited or non-existent training in basic ecosystem management principles will be able to functionally integrate ecosystem management concepts into their Extension outreach efforts. Furthermore, it could be argued that without some degree of immersion into the science of ecology and natural system functioning, the level of scholarly interest in such topics would be lacking. In the search to incorporate more ecological rationale into agricultural production, educators must develop a deeper understanding of the nature of agroecosystems and the principles by which they function.
Agroecosystems are communities of plants and animals interacting with their physical and chemical environments that have been modified by people to produce food, fibre, fuel, and other products for human consumption and processing.
A Need to UnderstandA study of 369 Extension educators in North Carolina showed that survey participants were divided when asked if Extension educators developed programs that emphasized whole-farm agriculture systems (35.9% disagreed, 29.8% undecided, 34.3% agreed) and if agents taught clientele holistic approaches to problem-solving (31.7% disagreed, 35.6% undecided, and 32.8% agreed) (Minarovic & Mueller, 2000). This would indicate that an important step in changing the paradigm of Extension agriculture education would be to gain consensus on the necessity to incorporate agroecological principles into Extension programming. We cannot expect our clientele to incorporate these principles if we are not capable of or are unwilling to teach them. In rapidly changing environments, both organizations and the people who make up those organizations either change with the times or risk becoming obsolete. So, as Extension positions itself to address contemporary issues affecting society, professional staff members will need to engage in lifelong learning in order to maintain professional expertise in relevant areas (Martin, 1991). Extension agricultural staff will need to be able to think differently and acquire a new set of knowledge, skills, and abilities--just as our farm producer clientele will be required to do. The more we understand about agroecology, the better we will be able to impart this new knowledge to clients. American agriculture, in all its parts, desperately needs to develop and implement strategic plans to reposition the industry with respect to the global marketplace and the social and environmental context within which it will operate. In this effort, American agriculture needs the applied research and Extension functions of the land-grant system as never before (Bloome, 1992). A contemporary Extension agricultural program that understands agroecology and believes in the need for a more sustainable production system can lead the way toward a more profitable and environmentally friendly agriculture. View reader comments for this Commentary in the JOE Discussion Forum. (This forum is no longer accepting new entries.) ReferencesAltieri, M. A. (1995). Agroecology: The science of sustainable agriculture. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Revised and expanded edition. Bloome, P. D. (1992). Seeking a mature relationship with agriculture. Journal of Extension [On-line], 30(1). Available at: http://www.joe.org/joe/1992spring/tp1.html Martin, D. (1991). Professional growth: A personal journal. Fort Collins: Colorado State University Cooperative Extension Service. Minarovic, R. E., Mueller, J. P. (2000). North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service professionals' attitudes toward sustainable agriculture. Journal of Extension [On-line], 38(1). Available on-line at http://www.joe.org/joe/2000february/a1.html Vandermeer, J. (1995). The ecological basis of alternative agriculture. Annual Review of Ecological Systems 26: 201-224.
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