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Dr. Alter's article is a timely piece that points seriously to a much broader issue that needs to be addressed...succession planning for Extension Educators. I believe the Scholarship perspective for Extension programs is right on track. Perhaps, an Extension Internship piece as part of a service requirement prior to graduation should be touted more. Developing an Extension Educator's Corp aligned to each of the different colleges is one idea.

The University of Guam recently carried out its reshaping initiatives and created a VP position for University and Community Engagement. This is where the University's Cooperative Extension rests. The idea is to bring Extension across all disciplines and tap the multidisciplinary expertise that exists in each domain.

Dr. Alter's article is a refreshing piece that should be consistently promoted. It is a wonder that if you ask most Extension Professionals what they think about Extension their view is not widely shared with other colleagues outside Extension. This is because of the lack or limited knowledge about Extension altogether. However, those that begin to bridge their programs with Extension find the awesome resources, national network that exists.

Happy Holidays!

Pete Barcinas
p.s.
We need to convene a workgroup to discuss this topic regularly. I would be interested in finding out how many Extension Programs recently in the last 3 years reorganized their programs.

 

By Don Schaffner on Friday, December 19, 2003 - 09:39 pm :

First, let me say thanks to Dr. Alter for a stimulating title. It certainly captured my attention. I must say, however, that article itself left me craving more substance. Dr. Alter starts by saying that his perspectives "... are cast as generalizations", but I was looking for specifics.

"Extension scholarship" is something Iâve been thinking about since I started my academic career almost 15 years ago, but I've been thinking more about it since starting a term on the College Appointment and Promotions committee, where we are asked to review promotion and tenure packets from across the entire college... from 4H agents to basic biochemistry researchers.

From this experience I have concluded that Extension needs to do a better job defining and measuring the quality of extension scholarship, and we need to tell our colleagues about it!

As a way of education myself, I looked up the phrase "Scholarship of Engagement" that Dr Alter used. I was astounded to see that Google (http://www.google.com) gave more than 2000 hits!

As a way of injecting more substance into the discussion, I'd like to share one of the more useful articles I found. It was in fact from Dr. Alter's own institution! http://www.outreach.psu.edu/News/Pubs/Monograph/eval.html

I look forward to learning more, and to hearing from my Extension colleagues around the country regarding their thoughts on specific things we can do to define and measure the quality of extension scholarship!

 

By Steven Deller, University of Wisconsin on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 - 02:02 pm :

One of the serious problems Extension has is documenting impact. With our campus based colleagues, impact is direct and easy: number of students, grants, journal articles. But Extension is more focused on "outcomes" rather than "outputs" (e.g., journal articles). The University of Wisconsin-Extension has been struggling with this for a couple years now and has made some progress (see http://www1.uwex.edu/impacts/documents/timeline2.pdf and the link there-in)

A dear friend of mine at a land grant on the east coast was critized by extension administration for publishing in peer reviewed journals. The logic was "if you spend your time doing applied research and publishing the results, you are distracting time away from extension." This is a terrible message to be sending to a PhD professor.

 

By Laura Hoelscher on Thursday, January 15, 2004 - 07:23 am :

And then there is the opposite side of the coin.

This week, I corresponded with a past JOE author, a Ph.D. with a 100% Extension appointment, whose Department Head does not credit publication in "low tier" peer-reviewed journals like JOE. Raises are apparently tied to "high tier" publication only.

JOE has always been peer reviewed and has become increasingly rigorous, as the February 2002 and 2003 "Editor's Pages" (and the forthcoming 2004) demonstrate.

I sent the author some "ammunition" to help convince the DH that JOE is an appropriate place to publish his work, but this anecdote and Steven Deller's contribution, above, suggest that there are a lot of "terrible messages" being sent to Extension professionals.