Community development (CD) and higher education (HE) teaching and learning have climbed the political agenda in the United Kingdom, in light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and consequent lock-downs; and also because of constrained public finances and austerity measures. In response to such challenges this PhD has a central aim to explore and determine the nature and degree of connectedness between higher education teaching and learning, and community development theory and practice. In this

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... spective, auto-ethnographic account, the author has explored a 40-year career spanning both community development and HE teaching. In doing so the researcher is acutely conscious of Bourdieu's notion of habitus (1990): that an individual's dispositions generate practices which emerge in their everyday actions. The thesis is also built around reviewing nine peer-reviewed publications, that investigated aspects of both CD and HE teaching. Furthermore, I present forty-three characteristics shared by higher education teaching and CD as an appendix; these resulted from a key-word search of the 2015 National Occupational Standards for Community Development (2015) and UK national lecturer job specification. The author shows the connection between these features and his own publications. Given the retrospective nature of this research, the prevailing political context is provided and discussed for the year's in which the selected works were published. A critical view is given of both the methodology, and also of the positive and negative aspects of community development and higher education teaching. The findings and conclusions are presented under three headings: First, Coherence of this PhD by published work. As one example, the researcher's community development activity and higher education pedagogy, and publications, represent a continuous thread from 1979 to 2020. Second, the author highlights the originality of this doctoral thesis. As an illustration, he brings together Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development ZPD and Snyder's (2000) Hope Theory. Snyder argues that hope provides fuel for progression. Hopeful thinking can generate pathways towards a desired goal; thereby enabling a person or community to bridge across Vygotsky's ZPD from what is known to new knowledge and capabilities. Third, the author presents the local, national, international and sector-wide impacts of his work.