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Personal Narrative: A Career As An Extension Agent

Decent Essays
I served as an Extension Agent for a few years. The Extensions are departments of Land Grant universities like the University of Florida, here in Florida. There are many around other states. Back a 100 years ago farmers needed a place to meet and learn about new growing practices, Extension sites met that need. The concept has evolved over the years and now it includes other aspects of community well-being and stability. “The teaching commons” for Adult Education is like the Extension was for farmers, a place for “conceptualizing adult and continuing education” (p. 3).
Within Extension sites many programs are developed. Programs center around answering community needs. Back in 2007, when the housing market crashed, financial programs to control financial management and spending
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Not taking note at the point of sale when buying transactions prevented some participants, as stated by them, from keeping track of their monies and many confessed to not know where really the ‘money goes’. “Sequential models” (p. 15) and according to William Perry's theory, where “people begin with a sense of absolute knowledge” makes me think of when participants come in with their set knowledge and ideas about financial management. They have had ‘experience’ and it did not matter whether this experience was negative or positive; their ways were what they knew and that dominated their tendencies to existing actions. Perry’s theory states “that all knowledge and beliefs are relative, and eventually develop a set of values and an individual sense of reality”. Learning about healthy ways to deal with money and repetitive money over drafting made participants more aware. Eventually, some adopted a new sense of reality; they began keeping receipts and or a calendar, and or ways to track their spending. Nonetheless, we fight “habituation” (p. 35) in the mist of having to “restructure our thinking as well as our
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