Is Community Development professional training too academic?

Three years ago, IACD commissioned a brief research survey to find out how many undergraduate training programmes there are around the world claiming to include community development. This was desk research and only looked at the websites of colleges and universities around the world that ran Bachelors/Diploma level courses that contained (or claimed to contain) significant content that appeared to embrace community development. We presented this research at a well attended fringe event at the 50th anniversary conference of the international Community Development Journal (CDJ).

The survey indicated that there were over a thousand such courses around the world.  However, barely 15% of these appeared to specialise only in community development. The majority were courses such as social work, youth and community work, local economic development, international development, health education, adult education or rural/extension work, where community development was included as at least one module. In other words the students were primarily training to be e.g. social workers, but community development theory and practice was included in their course. Very few of the courses we could identify were explicitly called a degree in community development.

Community development has long had an identity problem. Unlike other ‘people professions’ such as teacher and social worker, the majority of community development practitioners are not called community development practitioners. In our field a myriad of job titles are used by employers (both governmental and non-governmental) around the world. There was a brief period between the 1970s and 90s in a few countries, when it looked as though community development might emerge with a discrete professional identity separate from e.g. adult educator, social worker or health worker, but that didn’t occur other than in a few tiny pockets around the world. Rather community development was seen by Higher Education institutes and employers more as a term embracing a package of values, approaches, knowledge and skills that could be added onto, indeed even prefixing, an existing professional discipline. Thus the fashion for ‘community’ social work, ‘community’ economic development etc.

What we also found from our research was that from the course outlines available the large majority of these thousand plus programmes appeared to be primarily academic degrees. Only a minority explicitly included a practice placement with a community development agency, where the students could test out and acquire practical skills. And yet most of the programmes suggested that by completing their course the student could get a community development type job.

Thirty years ago community development courses tended to be offered at a diploma level; mature students were encouraged and in some countries there were explicit wider access policies that enabled community activists who might not have acquired secondary school level qualifications to access the course.  But a trend we have observed since then is the move towards three or four year degrees. And for these to be increasingly academic and theoretical. One of the key drivers of this may have been the formula adopted in many countries whereby research and academic programmes receive more kudos and funding than vocational ones.

Students are learning ABOUT community development, but not necessarily HOW to do it.

The huge risk here is that graduating students entering the employment market will not have had their community development skills tested in the field. They know ABOUT radical pedagogy and empowerment theories, about the causes of structural inequality or the Sustainable Development Goals. But they  don’t know HOW to actually do the community organising and community education work that is at the core of what community development is all about. The assumption here  is that they will soon learn how to do the job when they arrive on the job.

Would society be content if airline pilots, or doctors only learned the theories of flight and medicine before getting a job? Would we be happy if engineers only learnt their craft in a university lecture hall? Or indeed accept teachers who had never been on teaching practice prior to securing a job? Of course not.

Last year IACD, (for the first time since the UN  made its very general statement of what community development was about sixty years ago), revisited what, as a professional association, we understood the term to mean. Following extensive consultation with members we came up with the following:

Community development is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline that promotes participative democracy, sustainable development, rights, economic opportunity, equality, and social justice, through the organisation, education, and empowerment of people within their communities, whether these be of locality, identity, or interest, in urban and rural settings.

This new international definition presented by the profession itself is already gaining traction, with several national CD associations now adopting it, most recently the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals in the USA.  It is significant in that it reconfirms our belief that CD is a practice-based profession and an academic discipline. And it underlines that what community development practice and scholarship should be about is the organisation, education and empowerment of people within their communities.

IACD does not argue that this practice and scholarship need only be acquired through specialist community development degrees. We acknowledge and would want to promote the permeation of these competences across a broad area of what might be called the ‘people professions’.

But we would also want to argue strongly that any graduate programme that claims to educate and train its students in community development must ensure that it encompasses the practice and the scholarship of community organising, education and empowerment. We want to see reflective practitioners who will be of practical use to some of the more disadvantaged people around the world. So we call upon the Higher Education institutes that offer programmes in community development to ensure that their students are both knowledgeable and skilled in the craft before they get a job in the field. And we call upon all national CD associations and employers to put pressure upon the Higher Education institutes to ensure that their graduates have the skills and the knowledge to practice. A way of doing this we have found to be especially effective is for employers and practitioners to be represented upon the course planning and examination committees.

Over the coming twelve months IACD will be working closely with the Community Learning and Development Standards Council, also based in Scotland, to publish a set of international guidelines on the standards expected for competence in practice.