Community Education

Voices Beyond Walls is a digital storytelling project that enables marginalized youths to produce video clips expressing their cultural identity and personal narratives. The project is implemented in Palestinian refugee camps.

Cork Learning City defines a Learning Neighbourhood as an area that has an ongoing commitment to learning, providing inclusive and diverse learning opportunities for whole communities through partnership and collaboration (O’Sullivan and Kenny, 2017). The Learning Neighbourhoods Programme aims to support and recognize lifelong learning across Cork City’s neighbourhoods.

Community Learning Centres (CLCs) were introduced in Myanmar to ensure continuous learning and community development for out-of-school populations, with the concept ‘By them, With them, For them’ (Myanmar Education Consortium, 2013, p. 6). With support from UNDP and UNESCO, a small-scale pilot project enabled 31 Community Learning Centres to be set up to provide non-formal education and community development services in rural areas where access to education was low. Between 1995 and 2012, Myanmar set up over 3,000 CLCs.

Two cases of study circles in the Republic of Korea show how this small-scale form of lifelong learning implementation can meet different learning needs. The first is taken from Uijeongbu City, where the Uijeongbu Mom Sam Atelier learning club brings together mothers who want to learn more about good parenting. It was formed in 2006 and pursues ‘pleasurable childcare and happy education’ by organizing social activities and fostering a culture of community learning. As part of the Uijeongbu Lifelong Learning Exhibition, the group organizes a family play camp with games and lectures on parental mentoring. The group also reaches out to the community with voluntary services including cooking and childcare (Yoon, 2020). In Osan City, a study circle has been established to support those with low levels of literacy skills. The Osan City Literary Workshop aims to help people from this target group become passionate about learning by providing them with experiential learning opportunities. The principles of lifelong learning are reflected in the workshop’s recruitment of participants: those who benefit range in age from their thirties to their sixties and come from different backgrounds. Organizers of the study circle bring their practices and experiences to the National Literacy Teacher Conference each year and collaborate with adult literacy instructors in other cities to share effective methods (Moon, 2020).

Ganokendra (Bengali for people’s centres) and Community Learning Centres in Bangladesh focus primarily on developing literacy skills among out-of-school children, youth and adults living in marginalized rural communities, particularly women. The objective is to support sustainable local development. The activities cover aspects of income generation and basic literacy, as well as health, sanitation and early childhood care. Social events are organized for the promotion of literacy, such as theatre shows, writing competitions and local magazine publication.