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Marianne O'Shea, Community work theory into practice, Community Development Journal, 2025;, bsaf005, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsaf005
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Written by a team embedded in practice experience but underpinned by ideas and academic knowledge, explicitly setting out to show us that ‘theory and practice in community work are inseparable’ (p. 6), this book, Community Work: Theory into Practice (McArdle et. al., 2024), provides a timely resource to respond to several challenges facing community workers and their educators. As a community work educator, supporting students on the journey to developing a strong foundational praxis is both the core purpose and one of the greatest challenges of the work. Sparking learners to draw the links between theory and practice is a perennial problem, as students who are embedded in their own lived or practice experiences struggle to see how, or why, they might draw links to broader theoretical concepts. Likewise, students who may have been drawn to study the ideas that underpin community work as a discipline can, at the outset, struggle to see how these ideas can shape their practice approach to the everyday, complex and sometimes competing demands of communities, employers and funders.