Best Practice Speaker: Mark Paine

Affiliation(s): Institute of Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne

Keywords: Professional practice; learning relationships; mediation

The role of extension in community and industry development projects is coming under increasing scrutiny from investors. As a profession we have been partly responsible for this trend to question investment in extension because fail to adequately represent to others what we do as a professional practice. This paper is in two parts. Part one describes a way to define the professional space that extension workers operate within. Having defined the boundaries to professional work, we then briefly review the pressures and challenges affecting this space. The first part of the paper concludes with a model of professional practice. This model informed the development of a learning research project that culminated in a series six workshops spread throughout the main dairying regions of Australia. Part two reports on the results from these workshops and offers some recommendations for advancing professional practice through the development of learning relationships. These relationships are individual and group based and focus on three levels of delivery and development that operate simultaneously in a client: advisor interaction. One level relates to the system that is under scrutiny from the client: advisor; the second is the learning needs of the relationship that arise with changing practices; and the third is needs of the relationship itself. Workshop experiences from 75 extension workers across five states of Australia have been thematically analysed to draw conclusions about the professional development challenges and opportunities for extension. We conclude that the extension profession is undergoing a crisis of representation that can be resolved through the use of more effective inter-disciplinary projects. The development of these projects depends in part on investors supporting research into learning and change.

Key learning points

• Using a concept of professional practice could improve the profile of Extension;
• Learning relationships between advisors and clients provide a means to improve professional practice;
• The technical system, learning challenges and needs of the relationship need to be managed simultaneously in these relationships.