journal review

Jerome Jones

Etec 424

February 10 2011

Journal Review # 1

CITATION:

Hunt, W., & Coutts, J. (2009). Extension in Tough Times--Addressing Failures in Public and Private Extension, Lessons from the Tasmanian Wool Industry, Australia. Journal of agricultural education and extension, 15(1), 39-55. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

SUMMARY:

The article to me was about the government of certain parts of Africa is trying figure out how they can use different methods to try to get all the parties involved in production agriculture to agree, and give each other feedback and work together for the betterment of agricultural technology practices. That have a lot of different programs set up to try and help solve all the problems, but they can’t get high levels of participation from both sides. The officials of the organizations feel that they have to get everyone from the scientists to the small scale farmers to work together for the betterment of agriculture in Africa.

They are trying to change the agricultural system from being supply driven to demand led. They are even trying to better educate everyone involved, but it’s hard to get the farmers to come to the teaching sessions without some kind of incentives to ensure everyone comes out. This strategy works because many of the poor farmers won’t pass up a free meal. They have to get the farmers, extension agents, and scientists all on the same page, because when new advances are made they need each other to implement everything. This hard though because many of the farmers aren’t as willing to work with the other I have personally heard several farmers say “you can’t tell a farmer how to farm”, but the same can be said for scientist who normally works alone. I feel that in a eat or starve based agricultural system like in most parts of Africa they should all try their best to work together to make sure no one starves and every farmer, scientist ,and extension agent is a equal partner in everything advancement that can help the them all out in the future.

    

PERSONAL REACTION:

This article sparked my interests because the article dealt with problems getting everyone to work towards the same goal, which is getting everyone to implementing new technological advances in agriculture to help fight poverty. This article gave me a better understanding of how many different people are involved in technology advances, and how it’s hard to get everyone to agree on one goal, but it is harder to get everyone too share blame or credit for something new whether it works or not. I now understand that one of the biggest problems they faced is trying to get the well educated scientist and the poorly educated farmers to work together effectively, because scientist are used to working solo while with a farmer everyone helps out and share work. I agree with that because I know I in most cases would rather work alone, and when I’m forced to work in a group I don’t do as well. It also shows me that it takes great management and organizational skills to help both sides coexist, and work well together for the betterment of the group.  

In my previous teaching experience I learned that when you have your students working in groups, the two biggest things you have to make sure is that you have all your teaching material organized and that everyone in each group works well together. If you as the instructor don’t have everything ready then your students will not be on task and that’s when no learning is going on and especially when technology is involved there is a lot of stuff on the computers your students shouldn’t be looking at, so when they are not doing anything constructive bad stuff tends to happen. I also know from experience that not every student you put in a group will work well together some of the students you have will lay back and not do anything it’s your job to make sure everyone does equal shares of the work. Teaching requires many skills and if you don’t posses those skills maybe you should reconsider your career plans.