Neighbourhood Houses in Australia are community place-based organisations that provide education, support services, and develop responses to local issues with local communities. The practices within Neighbourhood Houses are informed by community development. Yet knowledge, understanding and practices of community development vary across the…

Background: Negative attitudes remain a major barrier to the equality of people with disability, especially when coupled with the lack of autonomy imposed on many people. This paper analyses how disability self-advocacy groups seek to change community attitudes and work towards systemic change by mobilising knowledge from their lived experience.…

Our paper focuses on delineating and scoping international Women's Sheds, a movement that has emerged within the past decade, mainly in Australia, Ireland and the UK. It addresses two main research questions. Firstly, what is the origin, distribution, nature and intent of Women's Sheds internationally to March 2021? Secondly, how might Women's…

As a "Dyirbal Gumbilbara Bama" woman and anthropologist in the sport for development (SfD) field, I have found that 'honouring Indigenous knowledges in research and practice' continues to be a form of 'lip service'. This position has been reached through my presence at conferences in Australia, where most attendees are non-Indigenous.…

This is a conceptual article arising from, and grounded in, research with a government-funded primary school serving high-poverty communities in Queensland, Australia. It is one response to the last 10 years of participatory research work led by the three authors of this article (the school principal and two academics). In this article, we write…

The purpose of this article is to provide an educational, theoretical, and methodological framework for using a special kind of action research, namely PALAR (participatory action learning and action research). This integrated methodology of lifelong action learning (AL) and participatory action research (PAR) has been developed over the past…

This paper analyses a community-based educational program involving private and public sector partners instituted in a small city in northern Tasmania. The program represents part of a state-wide initiative to challenge the persistence of structural educational disadvantage and what is understood to be an entrenched "culture" that is…

While active citizenship education programs are assumed to have positive benefits for the active citizenship practice of participants (UNESCO, 2009, p. 4), there is actually little evidence that programs do (de Weerd, Gemmeke, Rigter & van Riji, 2005, p. vii). This paper discusses a research project that aimed to determine and increase the…

Community development research suggests that positive partnerships and connections between groups can result in stronger, more resilient and productive communities. Despite community connections featuring increasingly at a curriculum level in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, research is only beginning to explore the nuanced processes…

The reawakening of the Indigenous Gamilaraay language in northern inland New South Wales, Australia involves righting two centuries of prohibition and mistreatment after invasion by English-speaking settlers. Gamilaraay is no longer used as an everyday language in the community, although it has strong emblematic value for the Gamilaraay community.…

This paper shares an innovative methodology to 'co-create' a curriculum with eleven international community development organisations from seven countries to prepare undergraduate students for international work-integrated learning activities. The co-creation process was complex, messy, and always evolving. Here we reflect on and document the…

There has been an increasing interest within the academic literature on the role played by Higher Education Institutions in the social and economic development of their communities. The Australia Government has recently released its National Science and Innovation Agenda (NISA) which is designed to incentivise university-community research…

The Whole of Community Engagement (WCE) initiative commenced in July 2014, led by the Office of Pro Vice Chancellor of Indigenous Leadership at Charles Darwin University (CDU). WCE aimed to build the aspiration, expectation and capacity of six remote and very remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to participate and achieve in…

A safe, supportive school climate is critical for school effectiveness. Unfortunately, the research linking a positive school climate to critical student outcomes includes few systematic reviews of the school climate literature and no reviews focused on the effects of interventions to improve school climate. This review examined the methodological…

This paper integrates the findings of two evaluations into the effectiveness of human health workforce training delivery and outcomes. In the period 2012-2015, Wontulp-Bi-Buya College ran the Certificate III in Addictions Management and Community Development and the Certificate IV in Indigenous Mental Health: Suicide Prevention. The key findings…