Barbara Pamphilon

Across the Pacific, socio‐cultural networks are a key way to share knowledge and skills. However, as peer‐to‐peer learning is contextually and culturally located, it is important to understand the place‐based specifics of such learning. This article draws on the evaluation of a series of household‐based workshops on agricultural development and food security in a remote area of Solomon Islands. It outlines this community's kinship ecology for farmer learning pathways and demonstrates the interdependence of gender and kinship‐based social networks, showing how topics related to ethics of living were shared within clans, while food and agriculture topics were shared within households. The article concludes that understanding local knowledge networks can contribute to the design of more effective peer learning for food security and rural development.

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), smallholder farmers, particularly women and girls, are the backbone of food production and food security; therefore, engaging these farmers in learning and development programs is key. We present and analyse a project that developed a story-telling digital video for farmers with low literacy as a learning tool in the sensitive area of gender equity. Although the video was a cross cultural collaboration between PNG and Australian team members, the PNG team took responsibility for the video’s vision, content, and process to ensure that the video resonated with the farmers’ local culture and context. As adult learners make meaning from their interactions in their own social world and that world is culturally, linguistically, and place-specific, we conclude that a locally created video drama featuring a PNG family can facilitate situated, affective, collective, and transformative learning.

This paper is a set of reflections from researchers in the Center for Sustainable Communities, University of Canberra, drawing out emerging lessons from the process of re-configuring research methods during COVID-19. The pandemic has presented new spaces of negotiation, struggle, and interdependence within research projects and research teams. It has left researchers often uncertain about how to do their work effectively. At the same time, it has opened up opportunities to re-think how researchers undertake the work of research. In this paper we reflect on several current research programs that have had to undergo rapid design shifts to adjust to new conditions under COVID-19. The rapid shift has afforded some surprisingly positive outcomes and raised important questions for the future. In our reflections we look at the impact of COVID-19 at different stages of designing research with partners, establishing new relationships with partners and distant field sites, and data collection and analysis. We draw on Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodological ideas and highlight ways in which we have adapted and experimented with PAR methods during the pandemic. We reflect on the aspects of PAR that have assisted us to continue in our work, in particular, how PAR foregrounds diverse ways of knowing, being and doing, and prioritizes local aspirations, concerns and world views to drive the research agenda and the processes of social or economic change that accompany it. PAR also helps us to reflect on methods for building relationships of mutual trust, having genuine and authentic collaborations, and open conversations. We reflect on the potential lessons for PAR and community engaged research more generally. Amidst the challenges, our experience reveals new pathways for research practice to rebalance power relationships and support local place-conscious capacity for action.

Providing professional development (PD) for Papua New Guinea (PNG) teachers is highly challenging due to the remoteness of schools, limited budgets, travel costs, and safety. The essential follow-up guidance and support after PD workshops is rarely possible, especially for the majority of teachers, who work in rural schools. In addition, the effectiveness of PD in facilitating collaboration among members of the school community can be affected by traditional cultural approaches to knowledge building and sharing. This article reports on an innovative form of PD with PNG elementary school teachers that used classroom teaching videos provided on SD cards for mobile phones. Videos of authentic teaching by other PNG teachers in similar contexts were provided to 260 teachers as follow-up to literacy practice workshop training sessions. The SD cards were used by 80% of the teachers in their own teaching, and more than half also shared the SD cards with other teachers. These findings show the value of SD cards in PD training in low-income countries, both for the development of individual teacher self-efficacy leading to confidence and better outcomes for the children in their classes, and for the development of teacher collaboration with colleagues

This paper focusses on the supermarket shopper, who makes both reflexive and routine decisions while undertaking his or her regular shopping and cooking practices. The research used narrative inquiry methodology and convenience sampling to gather stories about a group of supermarket shoppers’ perceptions of, and engagement with their chosen food retail environment and their attitudes towards making more sustainable food choices. The analysis drew on theories of practice and a food choice model showing that this group of shoppers were aware of the challenges of the modern food system and held ideals about purchasing Australian-grown, ethically produced food, eating seasonally and devoting more time to shopping and cooking, but the intangible resource of time dominated their dynamic value negotiations.

This article describes the development and uptake of two dual-language, culturally relevant picture books in five primary schools in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The purpose of the books was to disseminate agricultural and livelihood messages both at school and at home. Schools were provided with big-book versions as permanent school resources and asked to send small-book versions home to families to both support children’s reading and encourage the uptake of the agricultural messages. Evaluations at two different time points showed that, although many teachers valued and used the books, some schools were reluctant to share the books with families. Teachers appreciated the dual-language text and culturally relevant pictures and stories, and many requested that more of these types of books be made available. For more effective book distribution, mobile phones and church networks should be used to distribute books to families and support obtained from school boards and provincial education departments of PNG.

The short- and long-term effects of climate change on Papua New Guinea’s agricultural sector have generated significant debate in recent times. Current literature demonstrates that different population groups have differing levels of vulnerability and resilience to the flow-on effects of climate change, particularly drought. Yet different schools of thought on the country’s food security and effects on livelihoods persist. This article draws on evidence from research conducted in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea as part of a bigger economic empowerment project to illustrate the vulnerabilities of one community of rural semisubsistence farmers to drought-induced food insecurity. It examines responses to drought, identifies modes of resilience, and discusses the implications for future actions.