This is my first editorial as Co-Editor-in-Chief of JAEE. I was very honoured to be asked by Professor Mulder to serve in this capacity and will do my best to live up to his wonderful example of scholarship and leadership over the past 14 years or so.
In his last editorial, Professor Mulder talked about change. Extension and education are very much about helping clientele to deal with change, and this is something that all of us at the journal have been dealing with as we transition from Martin’s leadership, bring on new editors, and make changes to the organisational structure of JAEE.
Change can be frustrating and scary, but it can also lead to new options and innovative ways of doing things. As I started to dig into the website that manages the JAEE submission, review, revision, and publication system, I often found myself asking why things are done a certain way, or why aren’t they done differently? What does a particular term mean? How can I perform this operation?
While these kinds of questions can cause defensiveness or discomfort, it is good to question ourselves – and our organisations – from time to time. It is through asking such questions that we figure out better ways of doing things. And that is often what our research is about – asking questions so that we can improve extension and education theory and practice.
As researchers in extension and education we are often asking why, what, or how. This first issue of 2019 asks these questions in five different articles. (1) ‘What are sustainability perspectives in agriculture?’ (2) ‘How do we achieve transformational learning in conservation agriculture?’ (3) ‘How can research and extension challenge exclusion and marginalisation?’ (4) ‘What are new career pathways through professional agricultural education in Ireland?’ (5) ‘What are perceptions ICTs in South Wollo, Ethiopia?’
The first article, ‘Public agricultural extension workers as boundary workers: Identifying sustainability perspectives in agriculture using Q-methodology’ by Atika Wijaya and Astrid Offermans, looked for perspectives on sustainability by knowledge brokers (extension agents) to inform Indonesian policy dialogues. Their methods resulted in two different perspectives: technologists, perceiving sustainable agriculture as food security and the use of organic pesticides, and environmentalists, believing that sustainability is about active prevention of environmental degradation.
A second article is ‘From adoption potential to transformative learning around conservation agriculture’ by Lorenz Probst, Tim Hycenth Ndah, Paolo Rodrigues, Gottlieb Basch, Kalifa Coulibaly, and Johannes Schuler. This shows how transformative learning and communicative action theories can be used for agricultural innovation with a case of conservation agriculture in Burkina Faso. It contributes to the literature by testing learning processes on agricultural innovation that are based on theories of learning and communicative action.
Michelle Rice, Jane Marina Apgar, Anne-Maree Schwarz, Enly Saeni, and Helen Teioli contributed with ‘Can agricultural research and extension be used to challenge processes of exclusion and marginalisation?’ Rice used participatory action research in the Solomon Islands to see if researchers and extensionists could understand and thus change processes that exclude clientele. They found that starting with a collective vision, facilitating systematic reflection exercises, and having locally tuned facilitators who create safe spaces made processes of social exclusion understandable and ultimately actionable by researchers and extensionists.
Justine Deming, Áine Macken-Walsh, Bernadette O’Brien, and James Kinsella looked at ‘Entering the occupational category of “Farmer”: new pathways through professional agricultural education in Ireland.’ They examined the emergence of new potential career trajectories in the liberalised Irish dairy farming sector through analysis of student narratives in Dairy Farm Management. Young farmers who do not inherit land can still enter the occupation and used various mechanisms to do so.
Finally, we have ‘Perceptions towards information communication technologies and their use in agricultural extension: case study from South Wollo, Ethiopia’ by Fanos Mekonnen Birke, Mamusha Lemma, and Andrea Knierim. The authors sought to understand what perceptions were of agricultural extension agents toward using ICTs in their work and personal life and found that staff were not using ICTs much for searching for agricultural information. The paper contributes through connecting research on use of ICTs in extension with literature on behavioural factors when using technology.
The issue also contains information regarding the selection of best extension article and best education article. There were many excellent articles to choose from and it took some time for the editors to come to a decision. Congratulations to the winning authors!
I wish you happy reading and please continue to ask why, what, and how! I look forward to receiving your research submissions answering these questions in extension, education, and competence for rural innovation and transformation.