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Record W4407356986 · doi:10.1093/cdj/bsaf002

Philosophy, practice, and politics of community development: lessons from extension fieldwork in Newfoundland, 1960–1982

2025· article· en· W4407356986 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueCommunity Development Journal · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicAgriculture and Farm Safety
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Calgary
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Saskatchewan
KeywordsPoliticsCommunity developmentContext (archaeology)DirectiveSociologyPublic administrationWork (physics)Community organizationPolitical scienceSocial changePublic relationsEnvironmental ethicsSocial scienceLawGeography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract One of the most significant community development initiatives in Canadian history was sponsored by Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) from 1960 to 1982. Fieldworkers employed by MUN Extension worked across the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, engaging in strategies of community change that included social action, citizen participation, public advocacy, local services development, and popular education. The fieldworkers were guided by a philosophy of community development that positioned their work as politically neutral, non-directive, and educational in nature. In the latter 1970s, this philosophy—along with the community development practices it supported—was challenged by institutional changes that required fieldworkers to engage in externally directive projects oriented towards natural resource development. This historical case study of the evolution of community development philosophy and practice in Canada has important implications for contemporary scholars and practitioners elsewhere. Those implications include the importance of understanding both the institutional politics of organizations through which community development work occurs and the socio-political realities of the communities served by those organizations. Readers of this article will appreciate its nuanced account of a major community development initiative and will be inspired to reflect upon the institutional and socio-political context of their own work.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.670
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0020.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.049
GPT teacher head0.286
Teacher spread0.237 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it