A Learning Journey through a Heart-Centered Book

Abstract

As faculty for a graduate program in early childhood leadership, we co-designed a course on community-based action research around Patricia Wilson’s book, The Heart of Community Engagement: Practitioner Stories from Across the Globe. In this review we share how it mirrored our own deepening sense of community engagement practices, and how our students engaged with this unique text on their individual and collective learning journeys. We share highlights from the text that reinforced our sense of liberatory pedagogy. Wilson’s personal stories, as well as the stories of community-engaged practitioners across the globe , invite all of us to create our own purpose and intentions for the evolving path of facilitating change within ourselves and with others.

Keywords

• community engagement
• community-based action research
• community change practitioner
• deep democracy
• liberatory pedagogy