Community Learning Development Resource 602 – 02
COMMUNITY LEARNING – AN EXPLANATION
SUMMARY
This resource (602-02) lays out the fundamental beliefs, ideas and arguments that have underpinned and informed the development of our understandings and practice of Community Learning within Community Development and Neighbourhood Regeneration agencies and projects. This focuses on the area of work explored within the Community Learning Development resources available at communitylearningdevelopment.com.
About Learning and Learners
- Learning is a universal ability in all people – all individuals are learners.
- Learning is the core process by which people are able, to a greater or lesser extent, to change their individual behaviour – all that they know and understand, how they think and feel, and what they can do, and thus shape their lives.
- At any one point in their lives, what individuals know, think, feel and can do, together with their physical and mental state, constitutes their individual capacity to live and learn.
- Individuals can and do learn throughout their lives from everyday experiences. This, known as experiential learning, brings about many changes in behaviour and capacity, during a persons’ lifetime. Experiential learning is the core process in Community Learning.
About Education and Training
- Education and Training are descriptors for arrangements that purposefully engage people of all ages in learning, which changes their behaviour and generally increasing their capacity.
- Education and Training opportunities are generally provided in ways that are designed and organised to enable particular individuals to gain specific pieces of learning, which can combine knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes, and contribute to changing the learner’s behaviour and capacity.
- Education and Training provision is characterised by the transfer of learning from a source to individual learners, which involves communication through teaching – by direct human interaction, or at a distance through other media.
- In Education and Training, the learning is frequently, though not always, delivered through collective experiences, which are formally planned and organised as programmes or courses, involving groups of individual learners.
- Formal Education and Training opportunities, can make important learning contributions to behavioural and capacity building within Community Learning, additional to those derived from wider experiential learning situations.
About Community Work
- Community work is perceived to include all work with people, where they live or come together in communities of interest, that is concerned with enhancing their quality of life.
- Community work is seen as a continuum of ways of working with people, across three methodologies, differing in function, approach and styles:
- community provision – where the people are largely passive or reactive receivers of products and services, which may enhance their quality of life
- community development – where the people are in partnership with agencies and workers, feeling able individually and collectively to be actively involved in enhancing their quality of life
- community action – where the people are leading and taking control of ways in which they can proactively enhance their quality of life.
- All community work engages people in experiential learning. Community Learning seeks to ensure that this learning encourages and enables people to build their own capacity to move from being passive recipients to becoming empowered change agents.
- Current community work understandings and practice may not yet adequately take on board the idea that learning is a significant component in any community work engagement or that many individuals need to be able to build their own individual capacity before they are ready to participate in community developments or actions.
- Community Learning is concerned with encouraging and enabling people to build their capacity.
About Community and Neighbourhood
- The setting for much of the exploration of understandings and methodology in the development of our Community Learning ideas and resources, has been in work with people in communities and neighbourhoods, labelled as oppressed, excluded, deprived or discriminated against.
- These communities and neighbourhoods have become the focus for Community Learning initiatives, interventions, and training and development, endorsing the view that most Community Learning work should be community-based and targeted.
- The needs and wants of people, in multiply-deprived situations, and their entitlement to better opportunities to enhance the quality of their lives, are seen as the main drivers in the development of Community Learning responses.
About Community Learning
- Community Learning starts with the idea that every time an individual communicates with another individual or with their habitat – surroundings and environment, this is naturally a learning engagement – an opportunity for experiential learning.
- The potential for useful Community Learning exists within every contact and conversation between an agency or worker and an individual.
- We see Community Learning as primarily concerned to help build the individual capacity, collective capacity and community capacity, that underpin and drive changes within community development and community action.
- We believe that Community Learning is about learner-centred, holistic learning, which encourages, enables and supports individuals to choose to build their own capacity as learners and to choose their own learning journeys, which may lead to collective and community capacity building.
- We believe that without inclusively identifying and addressing the individual capacity building needs and wants of all people, any community capacity building and community development initiative tends towards working with those in communities and neighbourhoods who respond most readily and this leads to soft-targeting and is in danger of leaving behind those most excluded and disadvantaged, reinforcing their experience of oppression.
- Community Learning recognises that those people who are the most excluded, least confident or experienced as learners are likely to have the longest learning journeys to travel and in particular need supportive early individual capacity building opportunities to address their disadvantages
- We believe that without capacity building – individual, collective and community, any community provision, development or action will tend to be unsustainable, and is likely to fail if community work inputs from workers and agencies are withdrawn.