The paper is grounded in higher education in a local context in Taiwan. The purpose is to explore pioneering efforts against poverty and social exclusion and to create a context and opportunity for authentic participation among educational institutions and communities in the co-creation of meaning, knowledge, and action during community transitions. Based on participatory action research, the researcher initiated an entrepreneurial spirit through teaching and learning in the context of communityengaged curriculum design. The paper provides an analysis of how university and local actors reach the common objective of local development, after which they initiate processes of personal transition as well as community transition. Participatory planning processes create a space for transformative social learning that leads to the evolution of academic research into partnership research, the transformation of oneself and others, and a shift in relationship dynamics leading to solutions for societal challenges and convivial and inclusive social action.

This paper examines an account of a practitioner-initiated transformation of workplace-based social relationship within a grassroots adult education institution. This tripartite relationship among adult students, staff and teachers, abbreviated as AST, is a major driving force for activities and missionary functioning of the XinZhuang Community University (XZ-CU) and thus constitutes an indication of conjoint collaboration. Grafted from historical context and the development stage of AST, the initiative and the intervention focused on redefining AST relationship from a distributed leadership perspective and represents a democratic core and alternative to school leadership that would render new opportunity to create ‘democratic structures and processes' that a Democratic School advocated. This work has led to the conception and practice of joint educational experiment with elementary schools. The objectives of this research (as a professional engagement) are two-fold: first, to outline the major observables of this engagement, including reviews of facilitating the evolution of AST relationship in past three years. Second, with the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and its variant as the theoretical lens for framing and understanding the phenomena, we then identify the critical contradictions and concerted efforts of transformation, along with outcomes that emerged and artefacts employed, as well as further impacts of school reform on structures and processes.

Sustainability and social design are paradigms central to contemporary planning and design education. This chapter takes sustainability and social design beyond the subject of teaching and instead focuses on incorporating these values as a way of practice in professional education. Using a case study approach, it explores the emerging practices of teaching experiments in the collaborative design and planning teacher learning community (CPDTLC), an informal community of practice with shared interests in collaboration at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. Four pedagogical approaches—learning by doing, reflection, collaboration, and community context—are the common practices among the members. Design thinking is used to analyze the social design innovations of CPDTLC. The experiences here reveal different scales and dimensions of social design in the classroom and beyond, and delineate an emerging teaching-learning relationship for new curriculum formation in the future.