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Connected Community Education that involves different stakeholders in the community can take many forms:
•Elder-youth mentorship
•Youth-youth mentorship
•Internships at community farms and businesses
•Youth empowerment initiatives and leadership trainings
•Wilderness education and ecology
•Youth entrepreneur projects and school-based businesses, for example:
• Restaurants and catering
• Student stores, farms and greenhouses
• Computer repair and training
Just as critical for the "Honoring All Life" domain is the recognition of our daily choices about what to eat; about how fertilizers and pesticides kill rivers and lakes as well as damage the human body; about how globalization and the rush to the cheapest prices we can find at Wal-Mart are creating slave under-classes around the world that support the American Way while overturning local environmental protections. To fail to address these issues by actively raising the social consciousness of the community is to amplify the cultural schizophrenia between our actions and the awareness of their consequences. It is to keep learning in the theoretical domain of the ivory tower, where much sound and fury can be heard that ultimately signifies very little.
In education today, the primary place where community connection is made is through Civics class. Increasingly these classes have been dropped from the curriculum in many localities, or relegated to a single course during middle school. That leaves students with precious little connection to the land or people that constitute the daily life of their community, and it cuts them off from any sense of power or connectedness that would help them develop civic or environmental responsibility, or participation in government. This approach unwittingly teaches disdain (i.e., lack of value) for the local community, inspiring many children to leave their communities after they graduate from high school. Only in a community that consistently fails to provide meaning and purpose to its youth does this kind of wholesale exodus make sense. We teach our children that value is "out there," in the pursuit of disconnected knowledge, money, and fame. The modern system of education has done its job well: students do not recognize their own purpose or value, or their connection to the community or planet, and so are well prepared to live lives of quiet desperation while being convinced that they are pursuing the American Dream.
Imagine a world where students can learn about their bioregion and local history; where they can talk with veterans about the real nature and consequences of war; where they can learn about the varieties of local economies and what it takes to live sustainable lives; where they can develop true sense of inclusion and compassion for the diversity of races as well as life forms in nature; where they can help take care of babies and help design a park; where they can develop a sense of the sacred; where they come to regard themselves as spiritual beings of limitless potential. For any of these goals to be realized, Heart Light must go much further than instituting a powerful learner-centered model; it must also engage the community in which learning happens. This vision is articulated by Edmund O’Sullivan, a proponent of Transformative Learning:
Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender; sexual orientation, able-body-ness and our body-awareness, our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy.
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~tlcentre/index.htm
Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive.
--John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education
It seems to me that the question of the learning environment is inextricably linked to the development of the life-enhancing skills. That is to say, in what environment or context will these children have to be able to explore and exercise these new skills? Without an environment that recognizes, validates, and encourages the application of such skills, teaching the skills will be more of a theoretical exercise -- rather like school is now for most students.
It is only in the last 100 years or so that a wall has been erected between schools and community life; that wall has only grown thicker over time, until we have arrived at the current modus operandi, where schools are almost completely cut off from the life that is actually happening in a community. For example, in my son's 9th grade “World Perspectives” class, there has been no discussion of Iraq or the war at all. No talk about the local tensions between Hawks and Doves who protest in Central Square on Saturday morning. I also doubt that the local housing crisis is being discussed. Or the recent taxpayer revolt in our county, or how our new governor's fiscal policies will affect property tax rates. Neither is there any connection to local agriculture, water quality, or the business climate. Children do not learn about economics, about balancing checkbooks, about raising children. Traditional schools are terminally disconnected and largely irrelevant.
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John-Michael Dumais
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