Community Development Journal

Westoby,, Peter

doi: 10.1093/cdj/bsaa018pmid: N/A

Having immersed myself in community development (CD) scholarship for the past fifteen years or so, dare I say I often find myself bored. That kind of boredom where you pick up a piece of writing with some sense of anticipation, yet quickly become downhearted as the writing becomes bogged down in talk of principles, values, ideas, concepts – basically abstractions. Well, when Patricia Wilson’s The Heart of Community Engagement: Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe (Routledge, 2019) arrived in the post, I opened the pages with that familiar sense of anticipation – and lo and behold I wasn’t let down. Here was a book that sung with life. And by life, I mean, it’s a book that is filled with nuanced authentic story telling – real grounded stories of social change from around the world; and real stories of people and practitioners, that embeds ideas and concepts – those abstractions mentioned above – in context and communities. More about these stories They are truly global, from my familiar South Africa, to Mexico, Columbia, Texas, El Salvador, India and beyond. They are also stories that have real characters in them. I particularly enjoyed the granularity of the stories that highlighted a key person in the community development work, and then also reflected on Wilson’s story in that work, often as an accompanying researcher/participatory evaluator. But here’s what I really loved about the stories: Wilson gave a voice to the difficult parts, the failures, the bits of community development where things didn’t go as planned, as hoped for. For me, this is indicative of authentic storytelling, not just foregrounding the ‘success’ – instead there’s a willingness to jump into what Ingrid Burkett calls the ‘swampy-ground’, or what is simply the messy-reality of any social practice. But the purposes of the stories are also clear – not story for story sake – but story that foregrounds: the necessity of a practice, a willingness to reflect on ‘what is done in a community’ and the ideas behind what is being done; the necessity to reflect on the quality of the practitioner, in recognition that ‘practice’ (what is done) cannot be separated from the quality of the person that is doing – and this is so rare in community development literature; the significance of what Wilson calls ‘the invisible’ – that quality of change or transformation within communities that is not easily seen, not obviously quantifiable; and the possibility of researchers accompanying communities – in numerous stories this is of Wilson herself, and sometimes with a group of students. I say this, because in the dance between theory and practice – a dance that we know leads to different kinds of ‘praxis’, Wilson is one of the few CD scholars who is focused on the ‘practice’ and finds theory that emerges from reflection on story and practice. As I teach community development to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and experienced practitioners, I find one of the keys is for practitioners to hone what we think of as ‘practice-frameworks’ (Westoby and Ingamells, 2012). I understand these as conceptual maps that guide practice (see Kelly and Westoby, 2018). Without a practice framework many social practitioners get ‘lost in the woods’ so to speak. In the light of this, I also loved Wilson’s book because it goes further than recounting rich stories of practice and practitioners, weaving a web of theories too – but it also distils a set of ‘generative patterns’ (see Chapter 9) that I see as a most potent practice framework. I’d suggest this framework, if not just grabbed as a set of mantras and models, but as a set of invitations into deep on-going (dare I say, lifelong) reflection, could be very useful for all social practitioners working in communities – not just community workers/engagement officers, but urban and social planners, eco-activists and so on. Beyond offering this most potent and useful framework, the book also contributes a rich metaphor for re-imagining social and community practice – that of ‘ensemble awareness’ (p.1). Introduced within the Introduction, then expanded in chapter ten, the metaphor invites practitioners to sense their way into a finely honed practice with the ‘…ability….to sense the invisible web of relationships in which he or she is engaged’ (ibid). This is to then work with – that is, ‘from the inside-out’ – the emerging community’s patterns and rhythms, ‘sensing with the residents the emergent possibility for the community’ (ibid). Now, I highlight this sentence because if all social practitioners – again, urban planners, community engagement workers – could get this we would experience a revolution, or transformation in professional practices. Imagine if all the expertise of experts was ‘held lightly’ such that those experts could listen to, learn from, journey with, support, add to, ‘the community’ (put in brackets because ‘the community’ doesn’t exist, but there’s no time for that discussion here). As such, this book deserves to be read by many as it’s calling for this revolutionary way of re-imagining a transformational practice. Footnotes * " I was introduced at a keynote of the 2018 International Association of Community Development as a community development scholar, activist and analyst. I kind of liked the ring of it; almost poetic. Yet, more accurately, from age twenty years I’ve been on a journey of community development (CD) practice, deeply shaped by a grassroots tradition, Freirean in nature and place-based. That evolved over many years, particularly as I worked in South Africa, Uganda, the Philippines, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. Then at the age of forty, I found myself a late-comer wading into the academy, and perhaps by chance took up a position as community development scholar just as Anthony Kelly retired from forty years of teaching/practice service at The University of Queensland (where CD has been taught for over forty years, a rich tradition). Since then, I’ve loved the journey of a more intentional dance that links theory and practice together – the rigour of the academy intersecting with the responsivity of daily CD practice. I’ve been a writer or co-writer/editor of fourteen books and over fifty professional journal articles on CD, and love that there is an emerging global ‘community of scholarship’ growing around the world. † " By Peter Westoby, May 2020, Associate Professor of Community Development and Social Science, Queensland University of Technology, Australia; Visiting Professor, University of the Free State, South Africa References Westoby , P. and Ingamells , A. ( 2012 ) Teaching community development personal practice frameworks , Social Work Education , 31 ( 3 ), 383 – 396 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Kelly , A. and Westoby , P. ( 2018 ) Participatory Development Practice, Using Traditional and Contemporary Frameworks , Practical Action Press , Rugby, UK . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC © Oxford University Press and Community Development Journal. 2020 All rights reserved. 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