Philosophy, practice, and politics of community development: lessons from extension fieldwork in Newfoundland, 1960–1982
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".