Looking at Canadian Community Development: Forging Connection and Understanding

Collaboration is a key component of academia. While it’s easy to romanticize the lone scholar typing away in an ivory tower, academics working together birth some of the best and most exciting ideas—especially when each holds a different background or perspective.

Sarah Todd, an English-speaking professor at Carleton University, discovered this for herself in meeting Sébastien Savard, a Francophone professor at the University of Ottawa. Coediting journals at the Canadian Association of Social Work Education, Todd and Savard found commonalities and differences in their approaches to teaching social work, resulting in their own coedited volume, Canadian Perspectives on Community Development. “What we wanted was the learning that was happening in our friendship across linguistic communities to be sketched out into a textbook, so the students in our classrooms and the scholars we work with would also have the opportunity for that kind of excitement and learning and curiosity.”

In the first episode of this four-part series, Todd talks the book’s fruition and gives some history to community development in Canada. A complicated and diverse effort, Canadian community development varies deeply based on a region’s history and culture. By working with Savard, Todd explains that she deepened her understanding of differing communities’ approaches to social work—especially between Francophone and Anglophone ones—and emphasized how “each tradition has both its strengths and its limits that we can learn from.”