Community Education
Community education is a process of personal and community transformation, empowerment, challenge, social change and collective responsiveness. It is community-led reflecting and valuing the lived experiences of individuals and their community. Through its ethos and holistic approach community education builds the capacity of groups to engage in developing a social teaching and learning process that is creative, participative and needs-based. Community education is grounded on principles of justice, equality and inclusiveness. It differs from general adult education provision due to its political and radical methodologies.
What does this mean?
- Community education enables participants to emerge with more than just new personal skills and knowledge; it leads to an increased ability to act as part of a united community for improved social justice.
- It provides learning opportunities that address the needs of the community and the individual whilst ensuring that the learners' experiences are recognised, valued and used as part of the learning process.
- The wellbeing of the participants and their community is nurtured during the learning process. This process also ensures that the tutor and participant are on an equal level as the learner identifies the knowledge which would be useful to them and the tutor responds by creating a collaborative, creative learning experience that facilitates and supports learner involvement.
- The values of community education are put into practice by the group and are promoted locally and nationally: justice, equality and inclusiveness.
- Community education supports the empowerment of people to identify action that is needed regarding their issues and also to understand why such collective action should be taken. It also supports the challenging of the existing social and economic structures.
Please download the information leaflet which describes this definition in more details.
