Helen Rodd will be one of the speakers to present at the one day symposium Learning and Teaching Through Communities.

Organised by the Public Pedagogies Institute in partnership with the City of Greater Geelong and Deakin University, the event will be held at Deakin University Waterfront Campus on July 25, 2018. 

The event will explore learning and teaching in community-based settings and environments.

Helen has 30 years of experience in a broad range of roles across the youth, education and community sectors. Her passions include working with diverse communities across ‘The West’ of Melbourne, working across the intersections of diversity, and practising (and teaching) community development. Her principal pursuit in this field is understanding and facilitating the complex dynamics of generational change. Her current focus is the Neighbourhood House sector, and transforming communities through grass roots community participation, community leadership and community-based research.

Helen will be presenting on an innovative and highly successful Community Leadership program she developed and delivers with Wyndham, Maribyrnong, Brimbank, Hobsons Bay, Moonee Valley and Greater Shepparton City Councils 2014-2018

Helen’s highlights/exemplary projects include:

• Recipient of the Vice Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching & Learning (VET) 2017
• Co-Recipient of the 2015 John Jago Good Governance Award with Wyndham Council for development of their community governance model from the Victorian Local Governance Association (VLGA)
• Two significant community-wide social inclusion projects with the City of Maribyrnong, Neighbourhood Harmony Project (DIAC) & Building Bridges- Cultural Games Project (Vic Health)
• Developing the Soul House project – involving rooming house residents, sole occupant households and other socially isolated people in neighbourhood houses
• Lead researcher with Williamstown Community Learning Centre on ACFE funded project, Yarraville to Williamstown Learn Local Corridor Partnership Study and Hobsons Bay Community Centres Research Project Report
• ‘The glue that holds our work together’, research investigating the central role of relationships in professional practice with young people published in the quintessential national youth work texts

The event will also feature Keynote speaker Liss Gabb, a creative producer, director, and curator in the field of participatory arts and social justice. Over the past 20 years Liss has developed a socially engaged practice that is based on working in partnership with communities that experience structural disadvantage. Liss provides the artistic leadership for cohealth Arts Generator, an award winning, participatory arts space that is a division of cohealth, one of Australia’s largest community health providers. Under Liss’s leadership the program has become an award winning, multi-arts program that serves communities in eight LGAs in the West and Inner North of Melbourne. Arts Generator’s unique model of engagement and cutting-edge artistic outputs are presented regularly at national and international forums and conferences.

The program will include presentations from guest speakers currently working on projects in the Geelong region.

This event is supported by Deakin University and the City of Greater Geelong.

Register Here for this event.

Coming to Spotwood, Melbourne, on Sunday April 15, 2018…
The Slow Fish Festival!

Call for Papers

Special issue for Locale: The Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies

Food Pedagogies and the Senses

Guest Editors:
Rick Flowers, University of Technology Sydney and
Elaine Swan, University of Sussex

In this call, we seek papers that offer analyses of the sensory politics of food pedagogies. Papers should have a local, national or regional focus on the Pacific Rim across Asia, Oceania, North and South America, which can include intersections with global and diasporic perspectives. By food pedagogies, we refer to attempts by a range of agencies, actors, institutions and media to ‘teach’ about growing, shopping, cooking, eating, and wasting food (Flowers and Swan 2015; Leahy and Pike 2015; Etmanski 2015; Sumner 2013). By teach, we mean various processes of formal, informal and incidental education and learning, inside and beyond the classroom. Examples of formal food pedagogies include cooking courses, health education, nutrition workshops, culinary tours, and permaculture courses; informal food pedagogies encompass museum food exhibitions, TV cooking shows, community gardening projects, food activist campaigns, food industry marketing public health programmes; and incidental food pedagogies cover learning from eating and drinking, at work, at home, in restaurants, and large-scale food events. Thus, food pedagogues can include museum curators, health workers, food tour guides, nutritionists, teachers, food activists, food producers and retailers, celebrity chefs and celebrity farmers. Our definition draws from Australian and American scholars who use pedagogy as an analytic to study cultural and social processes and relations which attempt to modify how we act, feel and think (Luke 1996; Sandlin, O’Malley and Burdick 2011; Watkins, Noble and Driscoll 2015). In essence, ‘culture can and does operate in pedagogical ways’ (Hickey-Moody, Savage and Windle 2010, p. 227). This means examining the pedagogical dimensions of processes such as socialisation, reproduction, interpellation, embodiment and analysing how forms of food subjectivity and food conduct are capacitated, regulated and shaped in gendered, racialised, heternormative and classed ways across public, private and domestic spheres (Watkins et al., 2015; Luke 1996).

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