In Process:

• Self-directed Learning Through Struggle: Tenants’ participation and community planning at Toronto Community Housing Corporation – Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education
• Why Motivations Matter? Exploring Agency and Structure in Top-Down Participatory Social Housing Governance – Australian Journal on Volunteering
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1. Foroughi, B., & McCollum, E. (2010). Community-based Citizenship: Tenants' motivations and learning in community-based social housing governance. In, Fiona Duguid, Daniel Schuguresnky and Karsten Mundel (Eds.) Volunteers and Informal Learning. University of Toronto Press.

2. Foroughi, B., Pennington, E., Rosales, N., & Schuguresnky. (2009). The Tensions of Participatory Democracy in Local Governance. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Studies in Adult Education. Carleton University, Ottawa.

3. Foroughi, B., & McCollum, E. (2008). Apprendre à participer ou participer pour apprendre? La participation des locataires et la gestion du logement social à Toronto. In Paul Maurin et Evelyne Baillergeau (Eds.), L’habitation comme vecteur de lien social dirigé (pp. 237 - 265). Presses De l’Universite du Quebec.

4. “Stitching the Health Quilt: Community-based research on self-management of chronic conditions among the senior population in one of Toronto’s Priority Neighbourhoods”. Paper presented at Taking Charge of Our Health Conference. Toronto. October 2008.

5. “Tenants, Community and Social Housing Governance.” Paper presented at Learning Democracy by Doing: Alternative Practices in Citizenship Education and Participatory Democracy. Transformative Learning Centre, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto October 2008.

6. “Local Participation: The Missing Key to Democratic Reform in Iran”. Paper presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies, Aug 2006. London, UK.

7. “Tenants' Engagement in Housing Expenditure Management”. Paper presented at the Canadian Citizenship Education Research Network. York University, May 2006.

8. “Lifelong Citizenship Learning through Participatory Management of Housing Communities: The case of Tenant Participation System at the Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC).” Paper presented at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Feb 2006, Boston, USA.

9. “Tenants as Citizen Residents.” Workshop presented at the Participatory Development Forum, August 2005, Ottawa, Canada.

10. “Information and Communication Technologies; Examining the Challenges for Rural Community Development”. Paper presented at the International Conference on “Lifelong citizenship learning, Participatory Democracy and Social Change”, University of Toronto, Oct 18th, 2003.

11. “Poverty Alleviation: An Inclusive Approach”. Essay written through a CIDA-funded awareness-raising project published in Canadian ethnic newspapers. Translated into Arabic, Bengali, Gujrati, Hindu, Pashtou, Persian, Punjabi, Urdu. Aug 2002.

12. “Community Health Volunteers in Iran.” Written in association with UNICEF/CENESTA, (English and Persian), Tehran, UNICEF, 1998.

13. Over 30 articles on Iranian Immigration, Women, Development, Diaspora in major Persian publications, Toronto and Tehran.

"The technique was discovered by facing the actual situation and planning a way by which the people of eastern Canada could be mobilized to think, to study, and to get enlightenment. We found the discussion circle. This did not involve any teachers. It was in line with our whole co-operative idea. We would make people come together by themselves and discuss their problems." Moses Coady, The Antigonish Way (1943)

It was exactly such discussion circles, not in eastern Canada but in rural Iran, that transformed me and the way I perceive development; it was such circles that taught me the fundamental role of education in development. Participating in those circles showed me the salience of community engagement in achieving development goals; observing how individuals and communities grow through the work of those circles showed me the prominent role of learning in sustaining the outcomes of development work. In fact, it was my own participation in such circles that taught me all about development; and it was the same experience that passionately encouraged me to leave engineering and pursue graduate studies in community development; leaving technology for learning, science for art, and brain for heart. And now, I feel so accomplished by living the life of an adult educator and a facilitator within communities.

I would like to emphasize that I see development as social transformation and social transformation as learning. Therefore, development without learning is not sustainable and learning without development is futile. Development flourishes learning and learning reinforces development. Development and learning nurtures each other and each without the other is simply void. This explains why I do not detach adult education and community development and present this complex as one unique field of inquiry. The integration of the two clearly represents a new era of conceptualization, in which learning augment community development and qualitative community development results in enhanced learning. Studying adult education in the context of community development is to interpret psychological theory of learning within its social text, an effort to understand ourselves better in the hope that self-enlightenment will lead to enhanced lives and improved conditions of communities. This makes the study of Adult Education and Community Development simultaneously fascinating and vexing.

Adult education for community development as I learned to define it involves two complementing grounds. One deals with knowledge and skill development for practical purposes. Second, it deals with learner’s identity (re)formation as she engages herself in curriculum and develops fresh attitude and perspective towards development. Applying constructivist approach, I begin my work through making sense of the subject by relating it to what learners already know; this is to genuinely value learners’ prior knowledge. To value one’s prior knowledge and understanding makes her feel special and motivates further engagement. By providing an encouraging and safe space for learners to critically reflect on their knowledge and experiences of community development as they review and redefine it, they learn values that subtly transform how they perceive their role in social transformation of communities they work with. As an adult educator I see my role as facilitating learners’ embracement of a new community of practice way of thinking. This helps learners’ ability to develop increasingly complex and sophisticated way of reasoning and problem solving within the complicated dynamics of community development.

Finally, I should say that teaching continues to instruct me to listen, bridging the distance between the teacher and student. Through my experience as an adult educator, I have realized how learning is enhanced, when we, adult educators, are less self-conscious and value everyone's process. Therefore, when facilitating adult’s learning, my desire is to learn to get out of the way as much as possible for all of us to learn from each other. I realize now I could spend my life training and facilitating adult learning without ever having a job description.