This volume presents the refereed proceedings of the Communities and Change conference, held on October 22–24, 2007, as part of a week-long Research Festival in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney.1 This significant national conference sought to increase the depth of exchange between disciplines and between universities and the field, within the broad theme of ‘communities and change’. The choice of this broad theme for the conference expresses a core theoretical project of the Faculty, which is to explore the connections between social policy and educational opportunity and to understand the transformative effects of education on communities as well as individuals. These understandings underpin the Faculty’s objective of enhancing professional standards in the key social and public service domains of education and social work. These understandings are also critical in the context of Australia’s development as a ‘knowledge society’ because they can inform the development of policy and practice to support just and equitable distribution of the opportunities and rewards of rapid social change.

The conference aimed to bring together researchers, practitioners and advocates from academia and industry to explore shared concerns – and to raise new ones – with a focus on the contribution of research. The program included a rich variety of papers and fora, drawing on the Research Networks in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, and on the original research of academics and practitioners in education, social work and related disciplines from around Australia. The papers collected in this volume explore different scales and dimensions of research on communities and change, and we have organised the papers in four themed sections.

xviThe first theme, ‘Supporting change for disadvantaged communities’, includes four papers that examine the impact of social change and, where possible, suggest ways forward.

Tony Vinson’s contribution, drawing on his recent major research project Dropping Off the Edge (2007), shows how social disadvantage compounds in particular localities. Analysing data from a wide variety of published and unpublished sources, this paper demonstrates the damaging consequences of limited education, poor health and low income when geographically concentrated. These result in an increase in involvement in crime and confirmed child maltreatment. Disturbingly, Professor Vinson’s research also shows that many areas with concentrated disadvantage today also showed concentrated disadvantage 30 years ago. However, there is some hope that policy-makers will act on the knowledge set out in the paper: the results of this research have informed the establishment of the new federal government’s Social Inclusion Board.

Engaging alienated young people in schooling is the subject of Ebeny Wood’s paper. Based on qualitative research undertaken in a public high school in Tasmania, this paper investigates whether the change from authoritarian to democratic governance in schools has been an unalloyed success for disadvantaged youth. Change to democratic governance in schools carries the promise of engagement and increased support for students, and Ms Wood does find that students are more likely to engage with school when the climate is less authoritarian. However, democratic governance in schools, as practised in ‘Woodfield High’, also makes demands on students to be more responsible for themselves and their futures – demands that some disadvantaged young people find hard to meet.

The complex challenges of change-making are also the subject of Frank Tesoriero’s study of a community development health project in South India. Dr Tesoriero explores the paradoxical impacts of working at a small scale in a profoundly unequal society. He found that the ‘Healthy Districts Project’ enabled previously excluded groups – notably women and dalits or ‘untouchable’ people – to participate in decision making about their destiny. Yet the process of expanding participation also stirred and threatened broader forces and powerful interests, which could not be addressed by the project. At one level, then, the successes of the project caused it to xvii fail. At another level, many valuable lessons were learnt, and the aspirations of the socially excluded were mobilised and developed.

Jenny O’Dea’s contribution tackles the issue of the social distribution of obesity among children, drawing on a large scale survey that is part of the ‘Youth cultures of eating’ study. Social class differences in the prevalence of overweight and obesity are well-established; this paper explores whether other socio-cultural influences, such as ethnicity, might be involved. The findings of the study clearly support this hypothesis. Associate Professor O’Dea shows that there are measurable differences between children and adolescents from different ethnic groups in the prevalence of obesity and in body image and perceptions of ideal weight. The findings have important implications for health, social and educational professionals in their obesity prevention work among children and adolescents from varying ethnic groups.

Our second theme is ‘Supporting change for children in communities’. This section includes two papers that explore the strategies that professionals and parents use as they care for children with disabilities.

Leigh Burrows aims to improve the way schools support the small number of children and young people with complex learning, emotional and behavioural difficulties. She describes how she used a therapeutic story in her work with a young boy who had effectively been excluded from school because of such problems. Through the story of ‘Max and the knight’, Ms Burrows was able to gather support around ‘Taylor’ in a holistic way. Her paper advocates for the power of careful observation, sympathetic engagement with a child in context, inter-professional communication, and a well-aimed narrative to reconnect a child to his family, school and community.

The second paper in this section, by David Evans and Iva Strnadová, explores the coping strategies used by mothers who are caring for a child with an intellectual disability. This mixed-method study of 13 mothers with children aged 5–13 sought to identify the causes of stress on these mothers, and how they coped. Finding that the mothers are significantly stressed, sometimes by the experience of services designed to support them, the authors report that mothers employ a range of highly individual strategies to cope. Some strategies drew on ‘inner resources’, some on xviiisocial networks. Some were oriented towards action for change, and others focused on balancing stress by enjoying leisure time and, indeed, life. Many mothers pursued multiple strategies. The authors conclude with the hope that professionals offering support to parents caring for a child with an intellectual disability will be able to learn from the research to help parents find personal approaches to cope well.

The third theme of the collection is ‘Supporting professionals for community change’, and includes four papers focused primarily on educational settings, but with some interesting connections with issues and contexts relevant to social work. Three examine the education of teachers, some in pre-service training and others in a professional learning context, while the fourth focuses on students in a community work studies program.

How and, more importantly, why information technologies might be used to engage ‘Generation Y’ students are the questions motivating Kerry Russo’s exploration of the Blended Distributed Delivery (BDD) program in use in teaching community work studies in a Queensland Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE). This paper starts by asserting the need for a well-developed pedagogical framework to underpin the use of information technologies in education. Ms Russo draws on practice inquiry in the Institute to propose a set of ‘pedagogical parameters’ for consideration in developing BDD programs, which offer ‘a combination of teaching and learning strategies within a pedagogical framework to engage learners’. Practice inquiry demonstrated that BDD provides learning opportunities both for teachers and students, and identified the need for students’ voices to be heard in a shared space of mutual respect and inquiry.

Teacher education programs are often criticised for being ‘too theoretical’, and insufficiently practice oriented. In her contribution to the conference, Lesley Scanlon reports on research into a teaching program that challenges the dichotomy between theory and practice, and shows how pre-service teachers came to understand theory as crucial to informing their developing practice. Surveys and interviews with students participating in an elective course on mentoring found that general sociological theories and concepts – including phenomenology and risk sociology – became powerful frames for students to reflect on their practice and to move from ‘knowledge about’ to ‘knowledge of ’ teaching practice.

xixTeachers are often the only professionals to come into day-to-day contact with children in need of protection from abuse or neglect, and are subject to mandatory reporting requirements. Yet their pre-service training may not prepare them well for these aspects of their role. Angela Fenton’s paper reports the results of research into the use and potential of the Strengths Approach for child protection education for pre-service teachers in Queensland. The Strengths Approach emerged out of criticisms of ‘deficit’ models of social problems in the social services field, and is now being explored in child protection and other fields. Based on her research on a child protection education module that builds on the Strengths Approach, Ms Fenton is encouraged by her initial findings that it seems helpful for pre-service teachers in this crucial area of their education for practice.

Schools are increasingly being required to ensure that students with a wide array of needs and abilities are effectively provided for. Nevertheless, students with learning disabilities may not be well met. In their paper, Kay Munyard and colleagues report on research into a professional development program for practising teachers, designed to help them understand, identify and respond to students with learning disabilities in mainstream classrooms. Based on analysis of participants’ feedback on the professional development program, Ms Munyard and colleagues conclude that the program was well-received, and that it has the potential to address an important gap in the capacity of schools to meet the needs of all their students.

The fourth and final theme of the collection addresses ‘Research collaboration for change’. Within universities, interdisciplinary research is increasingly being recognised as an important means of addressing the complexity of social, economic, and environmental phenomena in contemporary society. Meanwhile, as non-government organisations take on an increasingly significant role in social provision in Australia and elsewhere, they are developing their own research capacity as they seek to ensure they are working as effectively and accountably as possible. Research collaboration between researchers in universities and those in NGOs is also emerging as a fruitful, if sometimes fraught, way forward. The three papers in this section address these themes.

In their contribution, Sue Nichols and Lana Zannettino analyse the process and challenges of interdisciplinary research in education and social xxwork in an academic setting. Dr Nichols (an educator) and Dr Zannettino (a social worker) came together as collaborators on a larger research project on integrated early childhood services. Significantly, integrated early childhood services demand inter-professional collaboration in practice, while research on such services demands interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers. Their paper describes how they developed a structured way of working together to explore what they shared – and did not share – in the bodies of knowledge, research questions, methods, sense of the position of the researcher in social relations and sense of the audiences for research that they brought to the project. They aim to contribute to the development of a more explicit understanding of the process of research collaboration, which is particularly applicable to research on practice settings which rely on inter-professional collaboration.

Margot Rawsthorne’s paper explores the challenges of developing genuine research partnerships between universities and organisations in the community welfare sector, and suggests strategies for improving such partnerships. Drawing on existing research and her own extensive experience, Dr Rawsthorne explains how challenges to effective partnerships can develop at a range of levels from the inter-organisational to the interpersonal. She highlights the importance of a shared commitment to community development practice in transforming conflicts that may arise along the way. Overall, she is optimistic about the capacity of strong partnerships between universities and community welfare organisations to perform better than working on parallel tracks in the search for solutions to pressing social problems.

As community welfare organisations move into the research field, they need to find models and ways of working that may differ from those prevalent when social and practice research were primarily conducted in university settings. Suzanne Egan’s paper examines the research practice in a small community agency, Rosemount Good Shepherd Youth and Family Service, where she works as a researcher. Ms Egan argues that the development of practice-based research capacity within Rosemount has enhanced the organisation’s ability to respond quickly and appropriately to issues as they emerge from the ‘frontline’, and has ensured that the research-practice nexus is visible within the organisation. There are challenges, too, in small organisations where resources and time are scarce.

xxiThe paper concludes by calling for more research on the growth and orientation of research positions and units in community welfare organisations, in the context of increasing contracting out of social service provision and rising demands for practice to be evidence-based.

Taken together, the papers in the collection demonstrate the complex, challenging and constructive connections between education and social work, between universities and community organisations, and between research and practice.

References