Future Directions for Outreach and Extension: Expanding Opportunities for Sustainable Development through Youth Engagement

• In Event: Highlighted session: Ensuring youth voice in sustainable development and effective program/policy development: the potential for engagement through the UNESCO Youth as Researchers Program

Proposal

University outreach and extension have often been referred to the ‘best kept secret’ of the university and land-grant systems. This in part reflects the broad lack of knowledge about what these outreach entities do, but also a general misunderstanding by the public towards the depth of the services that can be drawn from applied research within our universities and partners.

Nonetheless, there are important cultural, social, political, and other unique conditions that exist within our localities and regions which shape the extent to which important voices and information is included in research and programming. There are also established narratives and images of age old extension services that no longer represent that reality on the ground.

As a result, there is often a strong disconnect between extension and outreach in the populations they are seeking to serve. In response, calls have been made for and increased multidisciplinary focus on problem solving among extension and outreach educators. It has also been the case that increasingly the recipients of programs and local residents are being recognized as being essential to effective research and practice. The engaging of the latter is critical to tailored multidisciplinary research and programming to meet a range of needs. This is particularly true with youth audiences, who know little of what extension might offer in helping them meet their needs, advance their agendas, and help expand their personal and professional skills.

Similarly, are often additional disconnects between extension and the youth population. Very often outreach programming is designed for an older audience, using very traditional methods. The end result, is that very few people take full advantage of the resources available and put these into applied practice to meet local needs.

Finally, it is also the case that outreach an extension are often missing critical areas of inquiry and programmatic development that are needed within our localities. It is in this setting that youth, and particularly youth as researchers, can both inform extension/outreach about potential research and programming needs, while at the same time provide a deep understanding for how best to market, promote, deliver, and share applied research programming.

In this paper we focus on the critical importance of engaging youth in substantive manner to provide data, innovations, and insight into curricula development and reach protocols. In particular we focus on the youth as researchers program and how this program and its inventive framework maybe used to better facilitate the connection and application of research findings to on the ground practice. As a result, extension and outreach may no longer be viewed as the best kept secret.

Authors

• Sebastian Galindo, University of Florida

• Mark A Brennan, Penn State University / UNESCO

• Alan Smith, UNESCO Centre, Ulster Unviersity, Northern Ireland

• John Davis Davis, Uiversity of Strathclyde

• Patrick Dolan, NUI Galway/UNESCO

• Jo Caffery, University of Canberra

• Kaila Thorn, Penn State

• Sean Campbell, Sean Campbell