Introduction

In the Fall semester of 2022, students from the course: Global Perspectives of Community Development, at Centennial College, embarked on a journey to unpack a dense topic, from within a dense and single authored text book: Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, by Phillip McMichael, in ways that helped them explore the content, author new versions of it, and allow their voices to redeliver it in ways they felt would be more accessible to future students. We wanted to amplify the students’ voice as they wrestle and critically examine the history of development.

Our purpose here was to develop our own critical perspectives at the same time as dissect the very foundation of development itself- its roots, its practices and its current day implications for communities. It feels important, if not essential, to consider development and the voices who tell its stories in this critical way so that when we speak of community development in a classroom of students from around the world, we’re not examining the story, only, from the privileged voice of the author, but in ways that also support a multitude of stories, voices and locations to help us recognize that each community, each country, and even each continent is unique in the ways culture, geography, politics, economics, religion and history intersect and impact people on a communal level, as a result of development.

In the ancient symbolic system of the West African Adinkra, there is a concept termed “Sankofa” which translates into ‘go back and fetch it’ – it is the wisdom of understanding that in order to know where we’re going or manifest our vision of the future forward, we must know where we’ve been. Through this course we begin to look at our current day social and environmental issues through a lens of coming to understand how such things came to be, historically, rather than assuming they’ve just always been that way or for some reason need to be that way. Rather than accept things at face value, our critical analysis of societal upheavals and transformations, global in impact, like colonization, industrialization and now globalization itself, allowed more thorough reflection into the current realities faced by communities as a result of these human interventions.

Development assumes an intentionality to it. But who’s developing? Who are the Developed, the Developing and the Under Developed? Where did this distinction even come from? From this critical lens we acknowledge that even colonialism was an effort of development with intentions to “make things better” but to make things better for who? At at the expense of who? And for the real purposes of what? In this way we take a deeper look at the problematic cultural norms, racial discriminations and stereotypical profiling embedded into the very social systems, laws and policies that we grapple with today.

We have to know where we came from and how things got this way in order to do better. So many of the social and environmental problems we face today are a result of development efforts that benefitted few to the detriment of many.

In a world where our local actions have global implications and our cities bring many nations into shared spaces and interdependent communities – critically examining and understanding our engagement of the commons, as a planet and a people becomes essential for us to sensitively and critically engage development in ways that promote empowerment in the face of oppression, peace in the face of conflict, cross-cultural awareness in the face of ethnocentricity, and justice in the face of corruption.

In this first version of our emerging student authored text, the intention and effort is directed towards new students to learn from the content produced from previous cohorts of students and then continue to build upon and contribute to the knowledge and representations of it. The topics centre around development as an outcome of colonialism and an outcome of a postworld war environment full of Western ethnocentricity.

Each chapter represents our students taking a critical look at development within a reflection of colonial and post-colonial efforts, in a world facing the devastation of ‘world wars’ and the necessity to rebuild social, political, and economic systems. They chose the topics that were of interest to them in a sea of options and perspective of ways to address the topic. They also decided that it was important to share these versions in ways that were creative, accessible and diverse in their representations of it.

From front to back we look at colonization and pre-colonial characteristics of colonized countries, the implications of Food and Foreign Aid on ‘developing’ countries and the overall implications of modernization and decolonization efforts as they evolve into our current version of a global community of people on a finite planet.

Please enjoy, reflect and build your own perspectives into these co-creations.