Foundational Knowledge and Skills in Community Development: A Comparison of Educator Perspectives

Abstract

The challenges metropolitan regions, cities and towns, neighborhoods, and villages face require community development skills that address complex community problems, engage multiple publics, and pursue collective strategies. However, there is no consensus about how community development should be taught due to its various understandings, theories, and approaches. The article presents the results of a community development educator survey and illustrates a diversity of responses to educational delivery among forty-eight respondents representing twenty-seven community development programs in the United States. We compare the perspectives of respondents who teach in planning programs with other community development educators to discuss commonalities and differences.

Reflexivity and Relationality in Global Service Learning

“…In 1994, the field of international education did not have a set of standards for quality GSL, whereas today, the Forum on Education Abroad has a set of guiding standards aligned in many ways with the FTL principles that inform a wider community of practitioners as well as a more recent systematic review of principles guiding GSL (Hawes et al, 2021). In addition, there has been an increase in GSL publications that focus on community and international development theories as well as research that emphasizes community voice, participation, and impact (Larsen, 2015;Reynolds, 2014;Rios et al, 2021).…”