A View from the Ivory Tower

I have always believed that university research should serve the community. Coming out of a land grant college, I was taught that research should be informed by the educational needs of the greater public community, and that it should have some practical application in improving people’s lives.1 Under the “Wisconsin Idea” of extension education popularized in the early 1900s, university research on everything from new soil conservation techniques and sustainable forest management to advances in civil engineering, medical science and education would be extended out to the public, informed at its root by people’s needs.

My present employer, the University of British Columbia, ran a thriving Department of Extension Education from 1936 to 1979, following this “Wisconsin Idea.” As former UBC adult educator Gordon Selman (1975) tells the story, for almost four decades the UBC Department of Extension Education offered community-oriented, non-credit, nonformal education courses for adults across the province.

Theatre, music, creative writing, group study correspondence courses, a program in co-operative production and marketing for fishermen, the BC Farm Radio Forum, parenting and home economics education, youth leadership training, and film circuits traveling to local communities were all programs offered by the Department to greater BC. With a focus on developing both effective and imaginative programs for adults, research and experimentation on educational practice was central to the Department’s work. New methods and techniques of adult education at the time – radio, films, study groups, discussion techniques and field work – were constantly tested, debated and eventually adopted in extension programs across British Columbia and beyond.

In many ways this was adult education research at its best: it was wonderfully community-oriented, humanistic, wide-ranging, and dedicated to improving educational programs and extending them out to adults at the margins of society.

In more contemporary extension education (what I am familiar with is mostly in rural development), there is now a more radical call for a complete reversal of the ways in which knowledge is valued and created, and as a consequence the ways in which research is done. Research in practice, in particular, is now seen not as “us” (god-like) academics researching “them” (less than god-like) practitioners, and then extending the knowledge “created” by “us” back to “them”. Instead, it is academic and local experts (“indigenous knowledge specialists” as the extension lingo goes) coming together to negotiate research agendas, practices and outcomes which might be useful for both.

Here, the role of outside researchers is more to bring local experts – in our case, literacy practitioners, learners and community members – together to learn from each other, to organize forums of exchange and support, and to promote “lateral” research collaborations (across both geography and experience), rather than top-down transfers of knowledge, research and learning.

Part of this is to learn from each other what works and what doesn’t, what approaches to improving practice are most useful in what circumstances and so on, but part of this is also about developing a common language of how to look at educational practice, and how to learn more about it, to understand and improve it.

Outsider academics are expected to be experts in the practices of research, and might have experience organizing and facilitating research but do not pretend to have expert knowledge of local communities, literacy practitioners, their research priorities, or their desires for change and improvements in educational practice. In other words, academics, as supporters of research in practice, do not try to control the direction, shape or outcomes of research (as is all too often the case), but act as informed resource persons for practitioners interested in researching their own educational practice.

(Footnote)
Land grant colleges were universities which were given federal land in exchange for serving the public community through applied research and extension education in agriculture, engineering and home economics.