Fire Science Academic Trends

FossilMedic talks textbooks: 

FIRE SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME, AND IT IS ED KAPLAN’S FAULT: FESHE @ 10

Ninety years ago the American and United Kingdom fire services took a different path in professional development. The UK took the university engineering path, through the Institute of Fire Engineers (IFE) http://www.ife-usa.org/ . We took the vocational training path.

Chief Engineer Ralph J. Scott of the Los Angeles Fire Department is considered one of the fathers of fire fighter certification training, creating a fire college in 1925. He had the LAFD training staff research and document every task that a fire fighter might be required to perform. The list of almost 2000 entries evolved into a document that became known as The Trade Analysis of Fire Fighting. While functioning as president of the International Association of Fire Chiefs in 1928, Scott convinced the U.S. Department of Vocational Education to accept this list as an official definition of fire fighter tasks.

The First Wingspread Conference on Fire Service Administration, Education and Research was held in 1966. This group of fire service leaders agreed that fire officers needed a broad knowledge base. They proposed an educational program that became the blueprint for the development of community college fire science and fire administration programs. This education process built on Chief Scott’s work by progressing from training into education.

Like many initiatives, this one stumbled along. For example, the bachelor fire administration Degree at a Distance program suffered from inconsistent and puny support and, like the National Fire Academy, had brushes with governmental extinction in the 1980s and 1990s. Ed Kaplan, an Education Specialist at the National Fire Academy, kept the program going through creative funding and bureaucratic creativity. Kaplan is an advocate for fire service higher education.

A 1997 snapshot would show that most of the chief officers from the United Kingdom with graduate degrees in engineering and hard sciences. Few of the United States chief officers had graduate degrees, the majority were somewhere between an associate degree and a bachelor degree.

FIRE EMERGENCY SERVICE HIGHER EDUCATION SUMMIT

Ten years ago the community college fire science programs were shrinking, in part because of paltry educational resources. This created another challenge for the bachelor Degrees at a Distance program, which was celebrating its 20th birthday. The bachelor degree completion program is built to serve community college fire science graduates.

Kaplan organized the first Fire and Emergency Services Higher Education Summit. He invited interested faculty from fire-based associate and bachelor degree programs to work with fire service stakeholders in order to update the fire-based curricula that was established at the 1966 Wingspread Conference.

Working as a conduit, NFA provides an annual meeting at the Emmitsburg, Maryland, campus where interested academic and fire service members donated their time and talent to develop a model fire-based associate and bachelor curricula. The attendees develop course descriptions and teaching outlines that are appropriate for easy adoption by academic institutions.

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During the 2002 conference, Kaplan arranged a roundtable with the fire science textbook publishers. By Academic Year 2007 – 2008 all of the model fire science courses have two or more textbooks that meet the FESHE curricula. This is a significant achievement and exceeds the results from the 1966 conference and the related development of college-level fire science textbooks published in the early 1970s.

HERDING SMART CATS

Kaplan’s skill in matching people with interests – with encouragement and some nudging – resulted in committee work products and professional relationships that have significantly moved the fire science academic world forward. The members donate their time and the process is transparent.

ACADEMIC CREDIT FOR VOCATIONAL TRAINING

One of the most significant results is the work with the American Council on Education to obtain academic credit for technical and vocational training. http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=CCRS

Most courses run by the National Fire Academy have achieved ACE recommendations for academic credit. So does training from a dozen other institutions. Virginia was the first state to make a seamless firefighter through fire officer career development program that combined the vocational training of the Department of Fire Programs and the Virginia Community College System fire science courses.

Frederick Community College (Maryland) provides a method to obtain academic credit for online self-study EMI and NFA courses. http://www.emergencymanagementstudy.com/content/default.asp

This coming weekend marks the tenth Fire and Emergency Services Higher Education conference. https://www.usfa.dhs.gov/nfa/higher_ed/feshe/feshe_conf.shtm

Ed Kaplan will not be in charge of the conference. He was promoted to be the Section Chief of Education, Training and Partnerships at the US Fire Administration/National Fire Academy. Talk about matching people with interests!