The poster is a promising mechanism for inclusive scholarship. Inclusive scholarship provides direct opportunities for inclusion and representation. Community partner and youth participants in an urban gardening program were engaged in program-related scholarship via involvement in creation of a poster and its presentation at a community engagement conference. This article explains how including partners and youths as coauthors and copresenters helped Extension professionals reach a wider audience while deepening relationships, empowering youth participants, and improving data quality

Carroll, Jan B.

Wilkinson, Deanna L.

English

Clemson University: TigerPrints

Journal of Extension Volume 57 Number 3 Article 12 6-1-2019 Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors Deanna L. Wilkinson Ohio State University Jan B. Carroll Colorado State University Recommended Citation Wilkinson, D. L., & Carroll, J. B. (2019). Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors. Journal of Extension, 57(3). Retrieved from https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/joe/vol57/iss3/12 This Tools of the Trade is brought to you for free and open access by TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Extension by an authorized editor of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact kokeefe@clemson.edu. June 2019Volume 57Number 3Article # 3TOT2Tools of the TradeInclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as PosterCoauthorsAbstractThe poster is a promising mechanism for inclusive scholarship. Inclusive scholarship provides direct opportunities forinclusion and representation. Community partner and youth participants in an urban gardening program wereengaged in program-related scholarship via involvement in creation of a poster and its presentation at a communityengagement conference. This article explains how including partners and youths as coauthors and copresentershelped Extension professionals reach a wider audience while deepening relationships, empowering youthparticipants, and improving data quality.Keywords: CYFAR, scholarship, participant engagement, youth empowerment IntroductionExtension professionals make a variety of contributions to knowledge dissemination and translation to communityaudiences. Moreover, they are expected to contribute to the scholarly literature as well. They must maintainawareness that the publications environment is shifting, with increasing emphasis on quality metrics and varyingexpectations for scholarship (Braverman, 2018). Demonstration of Extension scholarship involves generating (a)peer-reviewed academic products (e.g., journal articles, competitive grants, conference presentations), (b)applied products (e.g., curricula, fact sheets, technical guides), and (c) community products (e.g., newsletters,blogs, websites, reports, displays, and mobile applications that address community needs). Herein, we introducea scholarship tool that can be used to share best practices with peers, engage and empower Extension programparticipants, and document program effectiveness. We describe this tool within the context of the program inwhich we have used it, but its applicability within Extension is broad.Program DescriptionThe program with which we are involved, Urban Gardening Entrepreneurs Motivating Sustainability (Urban GEMS)(http://urbangems.ehe.osu.edu/), is an elective course for 8th graders, an afterschool academic enrichmentDeanna L. WilkinsonAssociate ProfessorDepartment of HumanSciences andDepartment ofExtension (Courtesy)The Ohio StateUniversityColumbus, Ohiowilkinson.110@osu.eduJan B. CarrollDirector, Civic andFederal EngagementColorado StateUniversity ExtensionFort Collins, ColoradoJan.Carroll@colostate.eduprogram, and a summer program for youths aged 8–18 residing in economically distressed urban neighborhoods.Participants in our pilot sample were African American, 12.3 years old on average, and 68.4% female; 94.7%received free or reduced-price lunches. Through Urban GEMS and the program's associated communitypartnerships, youths are engaged in implementing cutting-edge food production technology to grow healthfulfoods in various, and sometimes unlikely, urban locales and in consuming the foods they produce.Early evaluation results showed strong promise for achieving project goals. Participants reported increasednutritional knowledge, increased vegetable and fruit consumption, decreased unhealthful eating habits, increasedresiliency/grit, and increased community involvement in changing patterns of food consumption. Additionally,insights revealed about why community stakeholders and participants were engaged with the project werepowerful in demonstrating the value of the project to the targeted audience.Development of an "Inclusive Scholarship" PosterOur Urban GEMS team strongly relies on the involvement of community partners in program development,implementation, and evaluation. Moreover, participants' perspectives help shape and refine our approach.Therefore, with the intention of engaging our community partners and program participants in scholarship, wecollaboratively prepared a poster for The Ohio State University's Community Engagement Conference(https://engage.osu.edu/conference). This annual conference provides professional development and networkingopportunities related to supporting health and wellness in communities.Although literature has described youth poster contests (Ripberger, 2014), we did not find guidance for involvingprogram participants in preparing and presenting a scholarly poster. Moreover, discussion of best practices hasnot highlighted inclusive scholarship as we are defining it: a tool for Extension professionals (Calleson, Jordan, &Seifer, 2005; Franz, 2011a, 2011b). Therefore, we developed a process to achieve our goal. Urban GEMS staffmembers devised and used five steps for creating an inclusive scholarship poster:1. Design the poster using PowerPoint technology.2. Invite 12 individuals involved with the program to contribute to the poster via face-to-face, telephone, or emailcontact.3. Insert responses from contributors (coauthors) into a template, and edit them for grammar and spelling, andslightly for length where necessary.4. Distribute the poster to the contributors for review, and revise as recommended.5. Print the poster at the university's bookstore, for a cost of $63.To collect input from the 12 contributors, the poster organizers invited both adults and youths to respond to fourquestions about their experiences with Urban GEMS.We received important responses from our community partners. For example, the director of a participatingschool wrote this:All [School] students are benefiting from the infusion of living food gardens inside our building. It is a joyto listen to students' comments about eating directly from the towers. My students are enjoying theTools of the Trade Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors JOE 57(3)©2019 Extension Journal Inc. 2program which offers them exposure to wellness information, real life applications with food, and careerexploration experiences. I am still impressed by how well the program team was able to offer the UrbanGEMS "hands on" curriculum as a part of the students' weekly school schedule. This ensured that allstudents could be enriched by the opportunity.Youths' perspectives were equally valuable. The following examples are excerpts from statements by two youths:I like Urban GEMS because it is a fun program that is changing the Southside community throughgardening. I never thought of that being a way to change lives but it is having a tremendous impact.Urban GEMS is teaching me how to grow my own food and how to use my resources.The thing that I like most about Urban GEMS is that I get to watch the food grow and take care of theplants. Also I enjoy working with plants 1 on 1. Urban GEMS is teaching me to build trust with others, torun a business, practice public speaking and having a proper attitude for success when working withothers.Once the poster was completed, participants gathered at one of the Urban GEMS sites to view it and to rehearsetheir talking points for the conference. All coauthors were registered for the conference and encouraged to fullyparticipate, including by presenting their experiences in their own voices during the conference (Wilkinson et al.,2018). The completed poster can be viewed at https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/84751.ResultsAlmost 800 people attended the conference. Our project team presented the poster and distributed brochures to63 poster visitors in 90 min. The youth coauthors presented the poster, with the guidance of the adult coauthors.The Urban GEMS poster presentation was the only example of youth participation in scholarly dissemination atthe conference. Conference attendees were most interested in learning about what the youths felt they weregaining from the program, how the indoor growing systems worked, and what plans the team had for expandingopportunities to other youths. We received compliments regarding the youths' preparation and professionalism.Urban GEMS realized benefits of partner and youth collaboration in the poster beyond the conferencepresentation in several ways: (a) our team was invited to make five subsequent presentations to communitygroups about our work; (b) youths debriefed their peers about their conference experiences at The Ohio StateUniversity; (c) youths expressed pride in cocreating a poster about their work and an appreciation that theirvoices were deemed important enough to be featured in the poster; and (d) contributors from the differentimplementation sites learned about one another's experiences in cocreating Urban GEMS.ConclusionEngaging participants in generating scholarship was an attempt to strengthen relationships while teaching aboutthe importance of evaluation in generating knowledge for the community. Our approach to inclusive, engagedscholarship also exposed youths to professional development opportunities and the career pathways of Extensionprofessionals and university scholars. Our experience suggests that the process of cocreating/copresenting ascholarly poster with partners and program participants can deepen relationships, empower youth participants,and improve evaluation data quality. Creating space for youths' voices at venues that have historically notincluded young people holds promise for richer community-engaged scholarship. An inclusive scholarship posterdesigned and presented collaboratively can be a powerful tool for Extension.Tools of the Trade Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors JOE 57(3)©2019 Extension Journal Inc. 3AcknowledgmentsThis material is based on the work of Urban GEMS, a project supported by the National Institute of Food andAgriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, through a cooperative agreement with The Ohio State Universityunder award number 2015-41520-23772. The work is also supported by the Aetna Foundation's CultivatingHealthy Communities initiative. The project is also made possible through a Connect and Collaborate Grant, aprogram supporting innovative and scholarly engagement programs that leverage academic excellence of TheOhio State University in mutually beneficial ways with external partners. We acknowledge poster coauthorsMegan Beaver, Cecil Brown, Nasir Groce, Tiffany Groce, Frederick LaMarr, Bob Leighty, Sanyika March, JalenPayne, Tijuana Russell, Jerry Saunders, and Jamal Sanfo—Ohio State University Urban GEMS Program,Columbus, Ohio. The project was approved by The Ohio State University's institutional review board.ReferencesBraverman, M. (2018). The evolving landscape of academic publishing: Essential knowledge for Extensionscholars. Journal of Extension, 56(3), Article 3TOT1. Available at: https://www.joe.org/joe/2018june/tt1.phpCalleson, D., Jordan, C., & Seifer, S. (2005). Community engaged scholarship: Is faculty work in communities atrue academic enterprise? Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 80(4), 317–326.Franz, N. (2011a, October). Strengthening your engagement dossier. Paper presented at the National OutreachScholarship Conference Emerging Scholars, East Lansing, MI.Franz, N. (2011b). Tips for constructing a promotion and tenure dossier that documents engaged scholarshipendeavors. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 15(3), 15–29.Ripberger, C. (2014). New Jersey 4-H goat extravaganza: Efficiently meeting the educational needs of 4-H goatproject members, volunteers, and parents. Journal of Extension, 52(6), Article 6IAW8. Available at:https://www.joe.org/joe/2014december/iw8.phpWilkinson, D. L., LaMarr, F. V., Russell, T., Saunders, J., Leighty, B., Groce, T., . . . Sanfo, J. (2018, January).Growing the good with OSU Urban GEMS. Poster presented at the Community Engagement Conference, The OhioState University, Columbus, OH.Copyright © by Extension Journal, Inc. ISSN 1077-5315. Articles appearing in the Journal become the property ofthe Journal. Single copies of articles may be reproduced in electronic or print form for use in educational ortraining activities. Inclusion of articles in other publications, electronic sources, or systematic large-scaledistribution may be done only with prior electronic or written permission of the Journal Editorial Office, joe-ed@joe.org.If you have difficulties viewing or printing this page, please contact JOE Technical SupportTools of the Trade Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors JOE 57(3)©2019 Extension Journal Inc. 4

Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors

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Inclusive Scholarship: Extension Program Participants as Poster Coauthors

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