In his article “I Feel Your Pain: How and why the Academic and Professional Communities Must Work More Closely Together,” McEntire (2012) focuses on the exploration of two groups, namely, educators and practitioners, in emergency situations to understand how they act to resolve common issues. The author applies the comparative method to reveal the problems experienced by each of the groups, including a lack of awareness, improper organizational location, fluctuating policies, etc. Harnessing a researcher’s enthusiasm, McEntire (2012) clearly outlines the problems and hypothesizes on the ways they may be addressed. For example, the problem of awareness caused by the incorrect comprehension of emergency management by both scholars and practitioners leads to insufficient support. The problem of fractured identity is presented by the author as the multidisciplinary nature of emergency management programs along with plenty of organizations and agencies operating in the given field, thereby leading to failure to ensure shared responsibility. Various locations of both academic and professional communities result in constrained aspirations.
Another problem of fluctuating policies aligns with the ambiguous definition of emergency management. The above issues refer to changing policies and standards as well as evolving federal mandates that ultimately lead to dubious policies and practices and intermittent progress. McEntire (2012) elaborates on the idea of activism by discussing the problem of apathy, which can be comprehended as the deficiency of attention given to emergency management as a legitimate discipline. The cash-cow mentality is expressed in the intention of the scholarly community to bring in new resources and the one of the professional community to focus solely on homeland security grants. The limited budget also makes an inevitable imprint on the approach to emergency management, thus causing significant difficulties in meeting potential and demand (McEntire, 2012). Last but not least, there are the problems of staff shortage and overwhelming workload. In particular, faculty members, as well as personnel working in emergency departments, are frequently insufficient to perform all the responsibilities, which may contain teaching and course preparation for scholars along with training and disaster planning for practitioners.
The author declares a broad call for the acceptance and mutual support of both groups, greater attention to training and education, the implementation of knowledge, skills, and abilities-based professional development (KSAs), as well as enhanced leadership and management. With this aforementioned information in mind, it becomes apparent that McEntire (2012) attempted to understand the difficulties faced by practitioners and scholars, and succeeded. The article presents a rather elaborate approach to the comprehension and analysis supported with relevant strategies to address the mentioned challenges. Much of this discussion takes place under the umbrella of the current state of emergency management and its key actors. It is safe to assume that the author accomplished the objectives of the paper and proposed a transformation of the existing framework. The article under critique enlarges the vision of the situation with emergency management educators and practitioners and provides feasible recommendations for further enhancement. In other words, the knowledge base regarding the given problem receives new premises for development. Based on the given article, it is possible to conduct further studies focusing on collaboration between the mentioned groups and also develop and implement practical initiatives. To discuss the mentioned theme, the following questions may be utilized:
- What are the strategies that may help academic and professional communities to work together in improving emergency management?
- How to reinforce training and education to achieve collaboration between educators and scholars?
Reference
McEntire, D. A. (2012). I feel your pain: How and why the academic and professional communities must work more closely together. Journal of Emergency Management, 10(5), 319-326.