BackgroundThe importance of community engagement in health is widely recognized, and key themes in UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) recommendations for enhancing community engagement are co-production and community control. This study reports an innovative approach to community engagement using the community-organizing methodology, applied in an intervention of social support to increase social capital, reduce stress and improve well-being in mothers who were pregnant and/or with infants aged 0–2 years.MethodsProfessional community organizers in Citizens-UK worked with local member civic institutions in south London to facilitate social support to a group of 15 new mothers. Acceptability of the programme, adherence to principles of co-production and community control, and changes in the outcomes of interest were assessed quantitatively in a quasi-experimental design.ResultsThe programme was found to be feasible and acceptable to participating mothers, and perceived by them to involve co-production and community control. There were no detected changes in subjective well-being, but there were important reductions in distress on a standard self-report measure (GHQ-12). There were increases in social capital of a circumscribed kind associated with the project.ConclusionsCommunity organizing provides a promising model and method of facilitating community engagement in health.

This article is a result of our English teaching practice in a Children Education State Center, which belongs to a State University in the north of Paraná. The study was conducted with five-year-old students who had English lessons with pre-service teachers from the same University. The overall objective of the research was to investigate the importance of mastering the textual genre "game rules" – in our case, a board game – to carry out the developed and implemented activities during classes. This research, of qualitative nature, is based on the action research methodology (SAGOR, 2000; LEWIN, 1948). The data was composed of reflective diaries written by pre-service teachers during the mandatory internship, main locus of our research. The results showed that knowing the textual genre enabled students effective engagement in the discursive event proposed, thus achieving the main objective of the activity: recalling contents from the previous semester. In addition to that, we realized that the fact that the students had been exposed to such textual genre enabled a more meaningful English learning.

Optamos por usar o termo "língua estrangeira", pois este se refere ao uso/estudo de uma língua-alvo por falantes não-nativos em países onde tal linguagem geralmente não é um meio de comunicação local.