Introduction to Community Education (ICE) and the Case Study

Introduction to Community Education shows that there are many ways of understanding the terms ‘community’ and ‘education’, and that there are debates and arguments about what they should mean. It gets you to think about the purposes of community education and their different ideological origins. Very briefly, an ideology is a set of ideas and beliefs that can be used to justify an existing or desired arrangement of power, authority, wealth and status in a society. The course reviews important historical developments, introduces key thinkers and their influence on community education, and analyses current issues and debates.

ICE gets you to look at things in different ways, and from different perspectives, rather than teaching you how to practice as community educators. It shows that concepts, by which we mean ideas and notions, can be complex and that the same word can be used in different ways depending on the underlying intentions of the user. An obvious example is the concept of community.

The course also shows how the situations to which those ideas relate, are capable of a number of interpretations. The point of this is not to confuse people for the sake of it, but to bring into the open and to challenge settled ways of thinking and get you to examine your preconceived notions; that is the thoughts you already have, about community education.

ICE introduces some foundational ideas in the first four weeks; covering the complex areas of power, policy and globalisation. After this, it moves into specific topic areas with two sessions related to each of the three main professional areas in community education: working with young people, community work and adult learning. A further session considers how practitioners make crucial choices about the direction of their work. There is a set text for each session (a journal article or chapter provided in the course reader), introducing you to the life and work of influential theorists such as Freire, and Gramsci. The texts and lectures cover key ideas and discussion in class draws out some central concepts in terms of polarities, that is ideas that seem to be opposites. These ideas can indicate extremes of scale or suggest very different approaches to doing something. The poles are linked in some way:

* Personal and political
* Local and global
* Individual and collective
* Informal and formal
* Education and learning

The course presents and examines ‘positions’, ways of thinking, values and beliefs that people are committed to. As part of this, lecturers will include their own ways of thinking in the discussions that take place in class.

Seeing the situation differently

One key concept in the course is that of the sociological imagination, which involves making the connections between people’s ‘personal troubles’ to do with individual choices and behaviours, and wider ‘public issues’ concerning social and economic conditions. Is it the case, for instance, that the behaviour of the young people in the Cobblers Youth Club, can only be understood once we have a more complete picture of all the aspects of their lives?

What could be the effects, for example, of:

housing
education
employment
and culture

on the way they think about and live their lives?

How does C Wright Mill's (1970) notion of the need for a sociological imagination influence your thoughts about the situation at Cobblers?

What you do in cases like Cobblers depends on what you think about what is needed in such situations. But how is ‘need’ defined and when do needs become ‘social problems’? To answer such questions, the course considers the difference between communities of need and communities of interest in terms of how problems are constructed by, for example, policy makers. Read the following extract from Manning (1998) for an insight into this issue about defining needs.

Up till now the focus has been on the young people and their world. What about the workers though? What do they seem to be offering the young people?

To understand what workers do or should be doing in such situation, it is necessary to know something about the history of community education in Scotland. Since the creation of Community Education Services after the publication of the Alexander Report in 1975, the field has undergone significant changes, particularly since the adoption of the Osler Report in 2002.

What types of work do community educators now do?
Who do they work for?
What interests influence their practice?

Find out a little more in relation to these questions by reading the extract from Tett (2006). What do you think about the work going on at Cobblers in the light of Tett’s views?

What next?

Having explored the contribution of ICE in terms of seeing problems and issues differently, check out WWIG and the case study to consider educational ways of working in a setting such as Cobblers or PP1 and the case study to consider what it means to develop a professional approach to the work.

CUE has been developed at the University of Edinburgh by John Bamber and Clara O'Shea as part of the Student Recruitment and Admissions 'Transitions' Project in 2006/7. For further information on CUE and on CUE: Community Education contact: John Bamber, Department of HIgher and Community Education, Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 8AQ, Tel.: +44 - (0)131 - 651 6116, E-mail: john.bamber@ed.ac.uk

Website updated: June 19, 2008