© Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, Volume 7, Numbers 1&2, p. 29, (2001-02) The “New ” Scholarship: Implications for Engagement and Extension

The engagement movement in higher education is related to the groundbreaking work of the late Ernest Boyer. The mag-nitude of Boyer’s contribution is considerable, reflected certainly in the words of the late Donald Schön—a prolific contributor in his own right—when he interpreted Boyer’s proposals as “the new scholarship. ” Despite his admiration for Boyer, Schön was not enthusiastic about the prospects for change in higher edu-cation. He believed that the academy’s prevailing institutional paradigm, what Schön called “technical rationality, ” stood in conflict with the new scholarship. In this paper we summarize and interpret Schön’s argument. We then discuss the implications of the new scholarship for the engagement movement. We close by considering implications of the new scholarship for coopera-tive extension, a higher education organization that activel