Qualitative research as a tool for agricultural and extension education

In the opening of his essay, “Disciplines of Inquiry in Education, ” Shulman makes two important points. The first is that, because education has been tied to psychology as a foundation discipline, it has adopted, from psychology, the scientific, experimental method of research. The second is that methodology determines the kinds of questions a researcher is able, or at least is likely, to ask (Jaeger, 1988). We in agricultural education are, in a sense, doubly caught in this net of scientific inquiry, because our field of study is not only based on the foundation discipline of psychology, but on that of agriculture as well. It can be noted here that scientific inquiry, as we know it, stems directly from the plant genetics work of Mendel. Agricultural education comes by these empirical practices legitimately. They have served us well up until now. But do they remain the best possible choices? It is the essence of our questioning that this article will focus its attention. It is out observation that, as regards international agriculture and extension education, the “donor nations ” have often been quilty of asking the wrong questions in their approach to world agriculture problems. In this article, it will be argued that by expanding our researc