scholarly journals A confluence of two rivers: A reflection on the meeting point between community development and higher education teaching and learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
James Derounian
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Proximal Development ◽  
Development Activity ◽  
Higher Education Teaching ◽  
Word Search

Community development (CD) and higher education (HE) teaching and learning have climbed the political agenda in the United Kingdom, in light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and consequent lock-downs; and also because of constrained public finances and austerity measures. In response to such challenges this PhD has a central aim to explore and determine the nature and degree of connectedness between higher education teaching and learning, and community development theory and practice. In this retrospective, auto-ethnographic account, the author has explored a 40-year career spanning both community development and HE teaching. In doing so the researcher is acutely conscious of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1990): that an individual’s dispositions generate practices which emerge in their everyday actions. The thesis is also built around reviewing nine peer-reviewed publications, that investigated aspects of both CD and HE teaching. Furthermore, I present forty-three characteristics shared by higher education teaching and CD as an appendix; these resulted from a key-word search of the 2015 National Occupational Standards for Community Development (2015) and UK national lecturer job specification. The author shows the connection between these features and his own publications. Given the retrospective nature of this research, the prevailing political context is provided and discussed for the year’s in which the selected works were published. A critical view is given of both the methodology, and also of the positive and negative aspects of community development and higher education teaching. The findings and conclusions are presented under three headings: First, Coherence of this PhD by published work. As one example, the researcher’s community development activity and higher education pedagogy, and publications, represent a continuous thread from 1979 to 2020. Second, the author highlights the originality of this doctoral thesis. As an illustration, he brings together Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development ZPD and Snyder’s (2000) Hope Theory. Snyder argues that hope provides fuel for progression. Hopeful thinking can generate pathways towards a desired goal; thereby enabling a person or community to bridge across Vygotsky’s ZPD from what is known to new knowledge and capabilities. Third, the author presents the local, national, international and sector-wide impacts of his work.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Kotzmann
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Educational Disadvantage ◽  
The World ◽  
Higher Education Teaching

The Introduction highlights the importance of higher education and the existence of educational disadvantage in society, contextualised within current political events and discussions. It describes the intrinsic importance of education in allowing people to learn about themselves and the world they live in. It details the significant instrumental importance of education in the likelihood people will obtain employment and command higher incomes. It also provides a brief outline of different historical perspectives in relation to how best to provide higher education teaching and learning. The importance of law and policy for higher education is discussed, and the purpose and limitations of the research identified.

scholarly journals Contextually responsive and knowledge-focused teaching: disrupting the notion of ‘best practices’

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (SI) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ceclia Jacobs ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Staff Development ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Knowledge Bases ◽  
Good Teaching ◽  
Approach To Teaching ◽  
Conceptual Paper ◽  
Higher Education Teaching

The notion that universal ‘best practices’ underpin higher education teaching is problematic. Although there is general agreement in the literature that good teaching is not decontextualised but rather that it is responsive to the context in which it occurs, generic views of teaching and learning continue to inform practices at universities in South Africa. This conceptual paper considers why a decontextualised approach to higher education teaching prevails and interrogates factors influencing this view, such as: the knowledge bases informing this approach to teaching, the factors from within the higher education sector that shape this approach to teaching, as well as the practices and Discourses prevalent in the field of academic development. The paper argues that teaching needs to be both contextually responsive and knowledge- focused. Disrupting ‘best practices’ approaches require new ways of undertaking academic staff development, which are incumbent on the understandings that academic developers bring to the enterprise.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 184-193
Author(s):  
Charlotte Baker ◽  
Rebecca J. Blankenship
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Learning Culture ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Higher Education Teaching

In this summary, authors Charlotte Baker and Rebecca Blankenship provide an overview of the cases and their impact on the overall DLI initiative. They also explore similar initiatives at other colleges and universities and how these technical transformations are changing the higher education teaching and learning culture. The authors examine the DLI in terms of other short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals as noted in the 2019 Horizon Report and how the DLI initiative can be used as a vehicle to actuate an ongoing culture of innovation and digital transformation in colleges and universities across the country.

Online Teaching as Virtual Work in the New (Political) Economy

2010 ◽  
pp. 46-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Schwartzman ◽  
David Carlone
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Online Instruction ◽  
Online Teaching ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Virtual Work ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Online Teaching And Learning ◽  
Personal Time ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
Online Labor

Online teaching and learning has been adopted throughout higher education with minimal critical attention to the challenges it poses to traditional definitions of academic labor. This chapter explores four areas where the nature of academic labor becomes contestable through the introduction of online instruction: (1) the boundaries demarcating work from personal time; (2) the relative invisibility of online labor; (3) the documentation, recognition, and rewards attendant to online instruction; and (4) the illusory empowerment of online students as consumers. The theory and practice of what constitutes “legitimate” labor in higher education require substantial reconsideration to incorporate the online dimension.

Social-media-weaponised populism and community development

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Jacques Boulet
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Economic Background ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter assesses the resurfacing of populism and its much-discussed and documented adoption and enactment by leaders and citizens. More specifically, it discusses reasons for this (re-)emergence and its effects on people's daily lives and their participation in community life against the wider political-economic background, two areas central to much community development theory and practice. The first question posed is: what is going on with and around people — especially their modalities of 'being' and 'relating' — rendering them more 'prone' to being influenced by populisms and become populisms' 'accomplices'? Second, what role does social media play in this imposition/complicity dialectic? Indeed, social media powerfully invades and interpenetrates all levels and processes of the political economy, of people's everyday experiences and their subjective-affective lives, and they infest the mediating institutions operating 'between' the virtual global and the imperceptible here and now. Finally, a third question is posed: what is the effect of such socially mediated populism on communities and on efforts to (re)develop and maintain them? The chapter concludes with some ideas about ways to resist the (combined) assault of populism and social media and restart the project of democracy.

Community development in the UK: whatever happened to class? A historical analysis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Craig
Keyword(s):  
Community Development ◽  
Social Housing ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Development Theory ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Distribution Of Income

Prior to the 1950s, differing strands of what might be seen as community development can be perceived in work by extension officers in colonial settings, as an extension of trades union activism, or ‘community-building’ with a social focus, usually in social housing areas. Yet, despite a common emphasis on poverty and disadvantage, attempts to locate community development within a class-based understanding of, for example, the unequal distribution of income, wealth and power within most societies have been limited. This chapter will trace ways in which the issue of class has or has not been addressed within community development theory and practice, drawing on key texts and experiences from across the world. It will seek to identify the extent to which the mainstream practice of community development, as it has developed, has been able to locate itself solidly within and build alliances with more explicitly class-based forms of political struggle.

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