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University leaders discuss outreach
Dr. Eunice N. Askov Head, Department of Adult Education, Instructional Systems and Workforce Education and Development Professor-in-Charge, Adult Education Program College of Education	Outreach must be considered in teaching, research and service. Our departmental faculty and students are heavily involved in all three types of outreach activities.   In teaching, two of our department’s three programs are involved in the World Campus. In research, NASA has funded a series of projects that use technology to improve education in the K–12 schools to Dr. Barbara Grabowski, associate professor in Instructional Systems. In the same program, Associate Professor Kyle Peck has been very active in school reform, serving as principal investigator for a series of large school reform projects. He has also started a charter school in which he and his students do research on how technology can transform instruction.   The research projects of the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy are all outreach research projects, ranging from statewide evaluation of family literacy programs in Pennsylvania to determining the foundation or basic skills necessary for workforce development.   Similarly, personnel from Workforce Education and Development are conducting state-funded research projects on standards for various industries. One new faculty member, Dr. Paul Krueger, assistant professor of education, has assumed leadership of the Center for Research in Training and Development to conduct research with companies on quality standards. Professor Kenneth Gray is conducting research in various school systems on school-to-work and technical preparation programs. In service, several faculty speak and consult extensively in their fields of expertise.   We consider outreach to be an “on-load” responsibility as much as possible. To encourage engagement in outreach, programs (and in most cases faculty) are allowed to keep a portion of the salary savings generated from buy outs from grants and contracts. These incentive funds, begun in 1997 when I became department head, have led to a dramatic increase in the dollar amount of funding for outreach teaching and research. Outreach Revenue Sharing (returned to the college and then to the department) from outreach activities in both Continuing and Distance Education is being used to support and encourage outreach activities.
Dr. Deborah F. Atwater Head, Department of African and African American Studies College of the Liberal Arts	Our faculty are involved in a number of projects in the community. In particular, our faculty have taught classes and presented lectures at prisons in Huntingdon and Hunlock Creek, Pa. The outreach projects can provide faculty with another opportunity to disseminate information regarding their own research. It is an important part of our mission, and faculty are supported in such endeavors.
Dr. Don Bialostosky Head, Department of English College of the Liberal Arts	Assistant Professor Stuart Selber’s Technical Writing project with the World Campus makes a great contribution to the advancement of scholarship in rhetoric and to our sense of the department’s vision for offering a service to the University. The department sees this project as a model of what we are looking forward to in developing the advanced composition courses through outreach delivery mechanisms.   In addition to such distance-based initiatives, the outreach conducted through the Penn State Conference on Rhetoric and Composition has not only resulted in the publication of edited collections, but also has played a significant role in placing Penn State’s Rhetoric Program among the top three nationally. Since its first offering, the Rhetoric and Composition conference has moved Penn State to the forefront of Rhetoric and Composition studies, attracting prominent faculty hires and fostering public scholarship in the field, including examples from our own faculty and graduate students. The placement statistics for Penn State graduate students in Rhetoric and Composition who are being hired by major universities also owe something to the work of this conference series.   A recent English Department faculty hire clearly demonstrates the way in which outreach can become part of all departmental policies. Dr. Julia Kasdorf has joined the department as a poet who has a particular charge to address the civic, social, environmental specifics of place in Pennsylvania, and she is enthusiastic about the community portion of her brief. She is a faculty writer who will help us connect with the community in the broadest sense. She writes about Pennsylvania, comes from a Mennonite family and is very interested in enhancing the links between the department and the community. In this way, outreach is integrated into the department’s strategic plan for the role of the MFA program and undergraduate creative writing.
Dr. David Blandford Head, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology College of Agricultural Sciences	Our department has three focus areas: food and agricultural systems, environment and natural resources, and community development. Our mission is to improve private and public decision making in each of our focus areas through resident education, research and extension.   Regardless of their appointment (teaching, research and extension), all faculty members are expected to engage in outreach activities. Our outreach activities have made an important contribution to guiding research in the department. Much of the research that we conduct is “applied” research and is directed to real-world problems and policy issues. Faculty involvement in outreach activities has helped them to focus their research on issues of greatest importance to the citizens of the Commonwealth. One example is the range of research currently under way on environmental issues.   Faculty are very busy and their time is scarce. The main barrier they face is access to resources to enable them to transform the knowledge and information they have into a form that can be useful to the general public and to deliver this information to those who need it. We are currently in the process of expanding the resources available to assist faculty in disseminating the results of their research to interested groups. We are recruiting a Web specialist to help with the dissemination/delivery of information to the range of clients that we serve throughout the state. In addition, we shall be hiring an editor to help to package the information in a more user-friendly form.
Dr. Diane Brannon Head, Department of Health Policy and Administration College of Health and Human Development	As its major delivery mechanism for outreach, the Department of Health Policy and Administration sponsors conferences and workshops that draw on faculty interests and expertise. We use the conference as an opportunity for spending time with people whose views we value — other researchers, policy makers and practicing managers in the health care world. As a result of outreach activities, we have a vibrant network of linkages to our alumni and to organizations that hire our graduates. Ongoing consultation with these people is critical to keeping up with what’s going on in health care. It is a very dynamic field and our teaching materials can get dated very quickly.   We have made a major investment in outreach in the past three years, supporting a fixed-term faculty position to work in developing external relationships. Our department now houses the Pennsylvania Office of Rural Health, a major focal point of our outreach activities. The office is partially supported by Cooperative Extension, so that makes us the first unit in the College of Health and Human Development to have a formal link to extension. We are just beginning to explore this potential.
Dr. Roger M. Downs Head, Department of Geography College of Earth and Mineral Sciences	As a discipline, Geography has always had a strong link to policy decisions with respect to both the human and the physical environment. This reflects the nature of the discipline (spanning the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities) and the types of skills (e.g., cartographic, quantitative analysis, etc.).   We see outreach as fundamental to our responsibility as professional scholars. All faculty are encouraged to consult with public and private, profit and not-for-profit agencies and organizations. All faculty are active in research, much of which has direct application to policy issues.   In the same way that research and teaching are in a synergistic relationship, so too are service and outreach. The best illustration of that is the Department of Geography’s role in the University’s World Campus. We have a multicourse certificate program in Geographic Information Systems that has recently graduated its first class totaling 17 students. The program, built from existing resident instruction courses, drew faculty and staff together to develop new courses and led to a state-of-the-art approach to delivering asynchronous learning programs worldwide. The program has allowed us to build ties to major software companies that in turn will allow us to place graduates of our resident instruction program into these companies. We are extending the program, hiring new staff and continuing to pioneer in the delivery of distance education. This outreach activity blends together all of the components of the mission: discovery, learning and engagement.
Dr. Terry D. Etherton Department Head and Distinguished Professor of Animal Nutrition Department of Dairy and Animal Science College of Agricultural Sciences	The Department of Dairy and Animal Science has a wonderfully long legacy of being at the forefront of providing extension education information to the youth of Pennsylvania and the many animal agriculture industries in the Commonwealth. An important core of our Cooperative Extension and other outreach activities is to provide useful and innovative educational information and technologies to animal agriculture. To do this effectively, we have to monitor the needs of our many constituencies. This has resulted in a dynamic integration of societal needs into our research programs to develop practical solutions for many problems identified. This partnership with our clientele has also had an impact on our teaching programs. We are continually monitoring how our undergraduate curriculum prepares students to be “job ready” when they graduate. When necessary, we make changes in the curriculum.
Dr. Charles Garoian Director, School of Visual Arts College of Arts and Architecture	The administration needs to clearly communicate to faculty about the ways in which outreach activities like symposia and conferences can help fulfill the three cells of research, teaching and service that are required for tenure and promotion. Outreach activities can serve as a research opportunity — a gathering of all the minds, scholars and artists to discuss research topics — and an occasion to record and identify the content needed for an exhibit, a book or series of articles. In undertaking such outreach activities, faculty members will have satisfied a good portion of their research and creative work, including successful acquisition of funds through grants. The only cell that’s missing in this scenario is teaching, but if faculty really have a passion about the research, then it’s going to affect teaching in positive ways, as well.   New faculty need direction in how to use outreach activities effectively in their promotion and tenure efforts. A lot of faculty perceive this activity as extra work, because they do not understand how it fits within the scheme of the University’s promotion and tenure expectations. If faculty can make their work fulfill these expectations through outreach activities, they will have an interconnected workload that can provide them with a tremendous sense of fulfillment as the disparate elements of their professional work are brought together.* * NOTE: These remarks were taken from an interview with Dr. Evelynn M. Ellis, former director of Multicultural Programs and assistant to the associate dean for Outreach and Cooperative Extension, as part of a College of Arts and Architecture research project on Outreach. Ellis is now director of the Office of Graduate Educational Equity.
Dr. Richard D. Green Director, School of Music College of Arts and Architecture	The School of Music, like all arts organizations on campus, has always sought to bring as many people in our community into our events as possible and to bring the arts into the community, as well. One of the goals of our University arts organizations is to build audiences throughout campus and the State College community.   As are other faculty throughout the University, all of our faculty are required to maintain national professional visibility. Many of them perform frequently in our community, and these activities are recognized as part of their professional dossier at times of tenure and promotion. This outreach serves to raise the visibility of our school and the University throughout the state and the country and is therefore an effective means of student recruitment.   As part of our outreach, each summer the School of Music sponsors a High School Summer Music Camp. Approximately 150 high school musicians from a variety of locations throughout the Mid-West and East reside on our campus during one week in July and discover what it’s like to live the intense life of a musician. From early morning until late evening, students rehearse in concert band, chorus or one of several jazz bands and receive private instruction and master classes with our faculty in various instruments, voice and in piano and organ. Many of the students who attend our camp later elect to pursue musical studies in college, and some eventually matriculate at Penn State.
Dr. Paul P. Jovanis Head, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering College of Engineering	Faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering are strong participants in outreach activities, both explicitly and as part of their duty to the profession. Our faculty teaches many continuing education courses, including design of blast resistant structures, hydrologic modeling, professional expert witness training for engineers, to name just a few. Faculty members are also regularly engaged in programs through professional societies that contain a mix of practitioners and researchers — for example, the Transportation Research Board and the American Water Works Association. These connections help us build a better curriculum, enhance our research through ties with mission funding agencies and allow us to stay in close contact with our alumni.   I think honest support for faculty outreach is helpful and attainable. Most of the Civil and Environmental Engineering faculty members engage in outreach forms of scholarship because they see it as part of the way we do business. We reward outreach through the University faculty rewards system, but I think it is very difficult to attain parity with other areas of faculty rewards. All outreach must seek to attain the high level of intellectual achievement consistent with traditional forms of teaching and research.
Dr. Mukund S. Kulkarni Director, School of Business Administration Penn State Harrisburg, Capital College	The School of Business Administration (SBA) at Penn State Harrisburg supports the outreach activities of its faculty within the framework of the University’s mission. As a matter of fact, outreach is one of the six explicitly articulated goals of the SBA. In particular, the SBA encourages its faculty to provide business-related services and expertise to the public and private sectors. Outreach activities include delivering lectures, consulting, providing information, conducting specialized research in fields related to business, sharing ideas and research, producing cooperative research and much more. In short, the SBA wishes to provide the benefits of the knowledge and expertise of its faculty and students to outsiders: the public, government, business and industry and other academic institutions and professionals.   For example, the SBA has an active internship program with local business and industry and government departments and agencies. Through its continuing education activities, the SBA supports workforce development initiatives by providing a certificate program in information systems, as well as specialized on-site training and education.   A monthly lecture series program, initiated in 1992 in response to interest from regional businesses, is thriving. This lecture series has become an important vehicle for the School of Business Administration to share its scholarly activity with public and private sectors of the region. In addition, the SBA houses a Center for Economic Education. The center provides training to secondary school teachers so that they can help their students become better managers of money, entrepreneurs, knowledgeable consumers and productive members of the workforce.
Dr. Robert Light Associate Provost and Associate Dean Penn State Erie	Outreach at Penn State Erie has led to increased interactions with business and industry. Since our resources are typically not at a level to support fundamental research, many of our faculty members have engaged in outreach activities in order to enhance their scholarship. These activities give faculty members access to test beds for their research, data sets to manipulate and sabbatical opportunities. In many cases, these opportunities have led to scholarly publications and conference presentations.   College leaders stress the importance of the land-grant mission and work with school directors and faculty members to incorporate outreach into all aspects of teaching, research and service. Efforts have included the promotion of and rewarding for involvement in continuing education and technology transfer activities. Recently, the college has established an outreach award, which recognizes the faculty member who has been the most successful in the incorporation of outreach into his/her teaching, research and service. This year’s recipient is Dr. John Beaumont, associate professor of engineering.
Dr. Robert E. Loeb Director of Academic Affairs Penn State DuBois	Faculty are encouraged to view all of their activities as part of a continuum of professional expression. Outreach is an essential part of the continuum. Academic Affairs encourages faculty to look for and act on outreach opportunities appropriate to their expertise. Support for these initiatives includes visiting area employers with faculty and Continuing Education staff to investigate teaching and learning opportunities, supporting graduate learning opportunities, demonstrating concern for adult learners and delivering off-campus programs. Faculty utilize the expertise gained from outreach activities to inform their teaching.
Dr. John Neely Chair, Department of Pediatrics Penn State College of Medicine at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center	The Department of Pediatrics’ mission is to promote the well-being of children and young adults through education, research and compassionate care. Inherent in all of these missions is an element of community service and outreach to those communities.   Pediatrics has always had a good relationship with regional physicians and a history of outreach. However, we believe that, more than ever, efficient networking with patients, physicians and the community is necessary to promote the total well-being of children in our region. We believe that there needs to be a better coming together of groups within our communities outside the realm of finances or politics. We go into our communities in the ways described above to spread our expertise, but I believe we also need to continue to develop these areas. As part of Penn State, The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center defines itself as a teaching hospital and organization. But I think we also benefit from being a learning organization that goes into our communities and learns through inquiry how to be a community outreach partner.   Last year, our department participated in 128 outreach presentations throughout Pennsylvania. Many of these were teaching opportunities by our faculty on such diverse topics as headaches and epilepsy, common childhood infections, Tourette syndrome, medications for nursing mothers, childhood heart problems, HIV, child abuse, arthritis in children, eating disorders in adolescents, calcium and nutrition in young growing women and science curriculums in the classroom, to mention only a few. Many of our faculty also participate in regional and national research studies on childhood issues, such as cancer, heart disease and arthritis. Of course, some of our outreach programs concentrate on community service in important areas for children, such as car safety, nutrition, nurturing and education.
Dr. Larry A. Nielsen Director, School of Forest Resources College of Agricultural Sciences	Because we are involved in the practical improvement of renewable natural resource use and conservation, we need the connection to the people and the land in order to guide our scholarship. Our faculty and staff serve on numerous government and organizational boards and committees, and they work with hundreds of citizens and organizations annually on specific needs. These connections keep us tied to the resource issues that affect our state and region.   For example, the outreach work that Dr. John Janowiak, associate professor of wood products engineering, does with various industries has led him to conduct fundamental research on the structural characteristics of various engineered wood products (that is, wood that is cut into small pieces — thin layers or flakes — and then glued back together to make stronger and more consistent products). His research is determining the strength of these wood products so that national standards can be set and the products subsequently used in structures like wooden bridges and framing timber for buildings.
Dr. James Ostrow Director of Academic Affairs Penn State Fayette	Like its extensive offerings in continuing education for workforce and economic development, the newest outreach initiatives at Penn State Fayette emphasize the integration of teaching, research and service. The Fayette campus launched a service-learning program in the fall of 1999, under the direction of Lynn Petko, coordinator of the Learning Enrichment Center and service-learning programs. The program offers course-based community outreach projects that emphasize discipline-specific or cross-disciplinary student reflection. This year, Fayette students learned about many of the social issues that face today’s communities, including poverty, health care, education and child-care, elderly assistance and environmental management. Approximately 200 students and one-third of the full-time faculty engaged in academically sponsored community projects in the past academic year.   Applying the skills and concepts learned in courses to projects that have positive community impact has deepened our students’ sense of the human value of education and has helped them to discover possibilities for civic involvement rooted to academic learning.   Service-learning has also helped to create and sustain lasting and meaningful bonds between our campus and surrounding communities. Students, faculty and staff work with community-based organizations in a collaborative relationship defined by the dual purpose of educational enrichment and community improvement. In this way, the campus and community have become partners in the educational and economic development of the region — which is a core objective of the Commonwealth College’s mission.   Another prominent outreach initiative at Penn State Fayette is the Patch/Work Voices Coal and Coke Heritage Project, an ongoing preservation, research, publication, teaching and community outreach program focused on the coal/coke industries and culture of southwestern Pennsylvania. Dr. Evelyn Hovanec, associate professor of English and American studies, is the center’s founding director. Over the years, the project has served as a resource center for the development and offering of University courses and lectures to external audiences. Its archives contain recorded oral histories; mining artifacts; photographs, maps, blueprints, documents and scrapbooks; special library collections of coal mining literature, manuscripts, essays, poetry and journal articles; music, videos and slide/tape presentations; and a collection of artwork by local and regional artists chronicling the lives, places and events of the Connellsville Coke Region. Faculty and staff lead field trips for public schools, and workshops are also held upon request to aid area teachers in their efforts to make local area history and experiences a part of the curriculum.
Dr. Sara Parks Director, School of Hotel, Restaurant and Recreation Management College of Health and Human Development	Over a decade ago, Ernest Boyer in Scholarship Reconsidered suggested a need for a broadened definition of scholarship to include four functions: discovery, integration, application and teaching. His recommendations were based on the need to address dramatically expanding boundaries of knowledge in all aspects of society.   Faculty in the School of Hotel, Restaurant and Recreation Management (HRRM) have long been committed to engaging in scholarship which provides excellence in teaching, discovery, integration and application and which is responsive to the needs of society, the public and key external audiences in the hospitality, recreation, tourism and leisure disciplines and professions. HRRM faculty view the outreach dimension of the scholarship of integration, defined by Boyer as “giving meaning to isolated facts by connecting across disciplines,” as a means of helping to address complex problems faced by scholars and practitioners alike.   Similarly, the scholarship of application focuses on how knowledge can be applied directly to one’s field of discipline to help solve problems in industry. The Center for Hospitality, Recreation and Tourism Outreach and Research (CHRTOR) serves as a link between the expertise of faculty and client organizations. Through the center, faculty engage in a two-way process, where the exchange of problems and solutions, research paradigms and professional development activities adds to better application and integration of scholarship.   By bringing together external clients with faculty, CHRTOR has provided the mechanism to strengthen individual faculty research agendas and to increase the dissemination of research findings to audiences beyond other scholars.   These partnerships with business, industry and professional organizations have reaped exciting new benefits for faculty and students. They have, for example, been a means to: strengthen research plans to include an outreach dimension. participate in meeting the land-grant mission related to service and outreach. enrich classroom teaching and experiential learning. open new research themes, paradigms and sites. expand the expertise and visibility of the school’s faculty, students, alumni and programs. provide opportunities for students to not only be involved with service, but also with research projects.   Our School of Hotel, Restaurant and Recreation Management is in the business of preparing graduates to assume leadership positions. These positions demand leaders who are extraordinary knowledge managers. To prepare our students for this role, faculty must be continuously aware of the need for everyone to be the “best” in their respective disciplines. This is a challenge that can only be addressed by recognizing the interdependent relationship between faculty and their internal and external clients. Our outreach activities help to strengthen our research, teaching and service. Outreach is a key dimension in helping our faculty keep in touch with new developments in their disciplines, remain intellectually alive and place their teaching and research in a larger context. As we advance into the millennium, there will be a need for new teaching and research models that are responsive to all of our key audiences.
Dr. Kym Salness Director of Emergency Medicine Penn State College of Medicine at The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center	Outreach in Emergency Medicine is centered predominantly on community and professional education that has direct ties to the research and practice of its faculty. The Poison Center, for example, provides community poison prevention education through schools, health fairs and educational material mailed directly to the public. Every call to the Poison Center is an opportunity for education and intervention and future prevention. In addition, the Center for Poison Treatment accepts patients for research efforts and specialty care.
Dr. Bruce Sherbine Director of Academic Affairs Penn State Worthington Scranton	As a small campus, we are Penn State in the Scranton area, and it is through outreach that we become known beyond the campus. We cannot afford not to encourage and expect outreach from our faculty.   The Faculty Activity Report forms and tenure and promotion dossier dividers now provide a place for faculty to list outreach activities, but there is little evidence that it really counts. Traditional research is a better ticket to success, and faculty often fear trying the nontraditional (i.e., outreach).   Despite such barriers, more than 20 forms of outreach teaching, outreach research and outreach service are conducted by Penn State Worthington Scranton faculty. Among these are faculty participation in an Economic Development Council project funded by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania; faculty research on binge drinking at work with Partners for Prevention, a Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board/Penn State partnership to deal with problems of alcohol abuse among students; and student service learning to develop adaptive therapy programs for local senior centers.
Dr. James F. Smith Head, Division of Social Sciences Professor of English and American Studies Penn State Abington	For many faculty in the Division of Social Sciences at Penn State Abington, outreach activities are really an organic part of their teaching, research and service agenda. In order to achieve greater faculty engagement, the opportunities for outreach have to be seen as attractive and exciting. There has to be “something in it” for the faculty participant, particularly a sense of excitement. We have been fortunate to have in our division a dedicated and creative faculty whose personal sense of teaching, research and service involves outreach activities. Perhaps it comes with the territory covered by our degrees; perhaps it continues by virtue of the kind of people we have hired. Our very best faculty are curious intellectually and committed socially and professionally. It would not occur to them not to be involved with outreach.   Outreach is part of our mission and the way we conduct our business. We attend to outreach during the annual review process and recognize the contributions our colleagues make in teaching, research and service that qualify for the designation outreach in the same way we recognize the contributions made in resident instruction. The faculty are judged holistically, and outreach contributes to the overall evaluation. Support is provided through matching funds to secure external funding, released time and service credit. We also make note of outreach contributions when division “kudos” are awarded.
Dr. Elwin Stewart Head, Department of Plant Pathology College of Agricultural Sciences	The Department of Plant Pathology is actively engaged in the discovery of new knowledge and in the process of technology transfer from Penn State to our industry and grower clientele. Faculty in the department provide extension education programming and other forms of outreach for industry and growers involved in monitoring the effects of air pollution on forest health and in producing large grains, mushrooms, potatoes, tree fruits, grapes, vegetables, green house crops and turf. To meet their needs, Cooperative Extension educators interface real-world problem solving with academic and research programs being conducted by faculty and graduate students. The outreach efforts of our faculty contribute to sustaining profitability in agriculture and in the production of a secure, safe and abundant food system in the Commonwealth and beyond.
Dr. Gene Tyworth Chair, Department of Business Logistics The Mary Jean and Frank P. Smeal College of Business Administration	The Department of Business Logistics has had a long and active role in the outreach efforts of the University. These efforts have included the development and teaching of many credit and noncredit courses made available at a distance; active participation of faculty in the development and offering of management education programs at University Park and customer locations; and corporate relations and the promotion of existing and new programs to potential clients. Currently, the department is an active participant and leader in Penn State’s World Campus and offers a certificate program at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Business Logistics offerings are among the largest in terms of students in the University.   These outreach programs have led to many corporate contacts, and some of these contacts have become corporate sponsors of the Center for Logistics Research, providing funding for faculty and graduate student research. Such outreach efforts have also led to very extensive relationships and projects with organizations. One good example is the U.S. Marine Corps, for Business Logistics is one of the leading programs in attracting funding through the Marine Corps Research University (MCRU) agreement.   The contact with employees of large companies, through either the World Campus or other interactions, provides access for research opportunities. The insight we as educators receive during these interactions also might suggest research ideas. Because many of our World Campus courses are offered on the Web, the outreach delivery mechanism provides cutting-edge opportunities to investigate the use of this technology in education.
© 2002 Outreach Communications,   Outreach & Cooperative Extension,   The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108,   fax: (814) 863-2765,   e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu