Community project
Community Education
This paper is the culmination of the literature, research, project design, and evaluation completed to define a community, the effectiveness of community education, and who is identified as a community educator. Within the context of these assignments, variations of community and persons identified as community educators were discovered; but the commonality of the research and the projects was the idea of “community betterment”. As quoted from the book, Linking Adults with Community: Promoting Civic Engagement through Community Based Learning, “an involved community is not a given, passed down as part of our place and time; it is chosen. Active participation offers us a chance to create meaning for ourselves on the basis of our particular contributions to something larger than ourselves and our families” (Reed and Marienau, 2008, p.90). This assignment is the summarization of the assignments completed for this course: the Literature Review, the Program Investigation, the Training Program Design, and the Evaluation of the Program Design. In the Literature Review the questions “Who are community educators?, Who are the providers of community education?, What are the responsibilities of community educators? guided the research assignment. It was initially determined that the definition of community could be liberally applied to various groups and cultures. As stated in the Literature Review, Warren (1978) defined “community to be that combination of social units and systems that perform the major social functions having locality relevance. In other words, community means the organization of social activities to afford people daily local access to those broad areas of activity that are necessary in ay-to-day living” (p.7). This definition of community assisted us in defining community education. According to Smith (2011, p. 1), “a broad definition of community education is education for the community within the
This paper is the culmination of the literature, research, project design, and evaluation completed to define a community, the effectiveness of community education, and who is identified as a community educator. Within the context of these assignments, variations of community and persons identified as community educators were discovered; but the commonality of the research and the projects was the idea of “community betterment”. As quoted from the book, Linking Adults with Community: Promoting Civic Engagement through Community Based Learning, “an involved community is not a given, passed down as part of our place and time; it is chosen. Active participation offers us a chance to create meaning for ourselves on the basis of our particular contributions to something larger than ourselves and our families” (Reed and Marienau, 2008, p.90). This assignment is the summarization of the assignments completed for this course: the Literature Review, the Program Investigation, the Training Program Design, and the Evaluation of the Program Design. In the Literature Review the questions “Who are community educators?, Who are the providers of community education?, What are the responsibilities of community educators? guided the research assignment. It was initially determined that the definition of community could be liberally applied to various groups and cultures. As stated in the Literature Review, Warren (1978) defined “community to be that combination of social units and systems that perform the major social functions having locality relevance. In other words, community means the organization of social activities to afford people daily local access to those broad areas of activity that are necessary in ay-to-day living” (p.7). This definition of community assisted us in defining community education. According to Smith (2011, p. 1), “a broad definition of community education is education for the community within the
References: Galbraith, M. (1995, April). Community-based organizations and the delivery of lifelong learning opportunities (Commissioned paper). Presented to the National Research and Postsecondary Education, Libraries, and Lifelong Learning, Office of Educational Research and Improvements, U.S. Department of Education. Washington, D.C Smith, M. (2011). Community education—What is community education? Retrieved February 04, 2012 from http://www.infed.org/community/b-comed/htm