A blended approach to community involved education for the wellbeing of society

This paper aims to look at the different layers of meanings of the concept of community, the role communities play in enhancing education and how this serves the overall wellbeing of societies. Given the complex challenges that are endemic to our globalized society such as climate change, intercontinental mass migration, and the consequences of technological progress, scholars such as Torres (2017) acknowledge that the modern structured education alone cannot solve these problems. Furthermore Hordern (2018) argues that specialized forms of knowledge need to be considered alongside non-specialized local knowledge.

This paper argues that there are lessons to learn from small-scale, kinship and neighbourhood-based community education. If, as Dewey (1916) argued, students who are able to learn within their communities make noticeable contributions to the wellbeing of their societies and improve themselves, then it does make sense that this approach is brought into on-going conversation with modern classroom based competitive education. The result would be a blended approach which has the benefit of holding the modern structured education through the classroom together with the traditional small-scale unstructured community-based education in a hybrid blended approach.

The authors of this paper will use lived experiences of African traditional societies and European modern structured classroom education together with a substantial review of the literature available in this field. Instead of holding the modern classroom structured education as an enemy of the traditional community-based education (Freire, 1970) this paper will suggest a new framework which reconciles the two.