Community Change and Action Research: The Unrealized Potential of Cooperative Extension
By Alice Diebel
Introduction
Cooperative extension, the outreach arm of land grant universities in the United States, was intended to “extend” the university’s research into communities and to provide local people—particularly in rural areas—with an education that they could apply to solve their own problems and develop their own communities.
Unfortunately, cooperative extension has become professionalized and has turned “inward.” Like most institutions, cooperative extension is more concerned with its own agenda, not the community’s.
Some questions for consideration:
- How might your community work with cooperative extension so that it can be an effective resource for helping solve community problems?
- How can cooperative extension, and other such institutions, return to its democratic roots?
Article Text
When I went to Michigan State University (MSU), a land-grant institution, I was told its history: In 1855, farmers in Michigan went to the state legislature and demanded they be given access to the resources of higher education that were available to elites through the University of Michigan (UofM). They wanted a focus on agriculture and wanted to learn what they needed to develop and run their own communities. The legislature told the farmers if they could find the land within 10 miles of the capital, they could have their university. A farmer donated the land—mostly swamp—and Michigan State was born with a four-year curriculum and a degree program to rival that of UofM. (Of course some say it was the largest wetland devastation in the state’s history, but I digress.) Agriculture colleges such as Michigan’s became prototypes for the land-grant university system, which began during Abraham Lincoln’s administration with the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862.
The land-grant system led to the creation of the cooperative extension program—the university’s outreach to communities, sharing knowledge, research, and expertise to address local needs. It is easy to romanticize any historical account, but there is ample evidence to suggest that the land-grant system and its cooperative extension programs were developed not just to improve agricultural productivity, but also to improve community life by encouraging local networks and creating viable, cooperative communities. This kind of relationship between academic institutions and communities truly reflects a democratic purpose for higher education. Scott Peters has written extensively on the democratic and civic history of cooperative extension for the foundation.
One of the key links communities had to universities in rural areas of the United States was through the services of cooperative extension. Since 1914, the federal government has contributed significant funding for this program so that it can operate in over 3,100 counties across the country. Cooperative extension focused on rural communities, providing knowledge for problem solving and research to improve agriculture. While “extending knowledge and research” is still needed for some technical issues, the problems communities face in today’s world need a different approach. Passing information down is insufficient.
Despite its important roots, cooperative extension has changed over time, mirroring the trends of most contemporary institutions—a trend that has moved away from this democratic purpose. This trend has also made it much more difficult for citizens to be active participants in shaping the outreach and cooperative extension work of universities. Like businesses, academic institutions recognize they have a customer to serve and thus work to create products they think customers need. However, this “service,” or “expert,” approach puts citizens on the receiving end, with not only a limited voice over what they receive, but with fewer opportunities to shape their own futures the way those Michigan farmers did. The customer-service stance actually inhibits the local expression of needs and leads institutional actors to perceive citizens as apathetic, as “blocking progress,” or as “complaining.” The way customers gain control over their lives and futures is by using their feet—by not participating.
Kettering has long recognized this problem of institutions standing in the way of citizen capacity for self-rule rather than finding ways to build capacity. In particular, the academy tends to provide its expertise without recognizing the expertise that citizens can bring to solving real problems. Thus, when the academic, land-grant institutions try to solve problems through research and the extension of that research to the public, the results are often not what citizens need or want.
In response to this situation, Kettering seeks experiments where institutions are more aligned with democratic practices or self-rule, just as cooperative extension was originally designed to do. In a new expression of this effort, Kettering sees great potential in revitalizing the democratic mission of cooperative extension as a recovery of its roots, and because of its wide reach.
In today’s world, communities can find a wealth of good, scientific information on the Internet, but they find less help on how to deal with public disagreements about land use, economic downturns, immigration challenges, and the like. These problems have implications for the kind of extension resources communities need and the receptiveness of extension to citizen input to the issues. To address them, communities require a public that is able to act collectively to name its problems and commit its resources to addressing them together, as public problems.
Kettering’s research asks, how can cooperative extension be an effective resource for solving the problems communities face in today’s world? What will it take for institutions such as those in the land-grant system to return to their democratic roots?
The W. K. Kellogg Foundation shares Kettering’s concern about the direction of land-grant universities. In the late 1990s, Kellogg published a significant report, Returning to Our Roots, on the future of the land-grant universities. Kellogg felt there was a need for public universities to renew their partnerships with the public. They especially saw the need for land-grant universities to engage in communities through cooperative extension.
In response to this shared concern, Kellogg and Kettering are creating a new research- oriented partnership, which will focus on rebuilding the democratic roots of cooperative extension through the land-grant system. It is perfectly suited to the two foundations as Kettering is interested in practitioner experiments as a means of changing practice, and Kellogg is interested in institutional shifts to a achieve the public good. This kind of initiative is about change: change at the grass roots and change in the system; change in paradigm and change in practice. To accomplish this change the two foundations are supporting a research initiative to identify where such practice is occurring, engaging in experiments in key locales, and disseminating what is learned through these initiatives.
To address this mutual concern, the foundations will place significant emphasis on shared learning for change. Shared learning for change, or action research, is a major focus of Kettering’s research. We have learned that significant, meaningful change can occur when practitioners reflect on their work both with the communities they work in and with practitioners who do similar work. Institutional change occurs when the work is viewed in the coin of the realm: in the case of the academy, research; and in the case of this initiative, action research intended to create change.
A first step in this research initiative has been work recently conducted by Michigan State University under the leadership of Frank Fear, Senior Associate Dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR).
ANR has decided that rather than take unsolicited research to the community, it would make its resources available at the community’s request “to work on complex and controversial ANR issues—at the local, regional, and statewide levels.” ANR recognizes that simply extending its own self-initiated research and information is not useful for citizens who face community challenges or public problems. And now the issues are coming. These are issues that require a blend of community judgment about what should be done and ANR research in response about what could be done.
When dealing with should, controversy can erupt and communities need a different kind of approach by extension to help the community work through its differences and identify the partners and resources to get there. MSU is one partner among many, as reflected in the following story.
Grand Haven, Michigan, is a community on the coast of Lake Michigan. It is rich with natural resources: relatively low population, lots of fresh water, wildlife, and undeveloped land. It also has a large deer population. Like the public, the deer appreciate Grand Haven’s resources, and their numbers have grown to the extent that many consider the deer a nuisance. These people want to see all the deer killed, while others in the community moved to Grand Haven because of the wildlife and actually feed the deer.
The city council had considered creating deer management plans, which were developed and presented by experts at great expense to the community. But the council, at the urging of the assistant city manager, decided to try a deliberative approach. They created an advisory council involving citizens, government and community agencies, and university wildlife experts. A long-time National Issues Forums leader from cooperative extension, Jan Hartough, and MSU’s Frank Fear worked in Grand Haven to build a deliberative approach to this community conflict. The deliberation was difficult and took many meetings, but the advisory council was able to name the problem and frame approaches to deal with it. As we see in so many deliberative approaches, the citizens came to realize that the issue was less about deer management and more about carving out a course of action that reflected the shared sense of the kind of community Grand Haven wanted to be. They essentially renamed the problem. The committee’s final plan was accepted by the entire city council.
The assistant city manager knew she was taking a risk by advocating for a citizen-focused approach, but in the end, she was glad she stood with the citizens. A plan by experts would not have resolved the differences in the public’s judgment about the kind of community the citizens want to have. She asked cooperative extension for help on a specific problem, and the response by extension was tailored to the situation.
Kellogg and Kettering are embarking on this initiative, which will involve many land-grant institutions and their cooperative extension programs, to explore the possibilities of renewing the approach that was so successful in the early days of the land-grant universities. The approach being used in this collaboration has real promise by building practitioner and community capacity for collective problem solving, by building a learning environment for future experiments, and by building a body of knowledge that is recognized by the university as scholarship. In the end, it is democracy that wins.