Community Education:Listening to the voices.

Community education may have had a clear, concise definition at one time, but that definition has been re-worked by the dynamic interpretations that have imbued it as a result of the community education movement, over two decades. This article tries to capture some of those new meanings and to raise some issues for exploration. It cannot do justice to the entire scope of the field but it will consider three broad areas in relation to these trends. Firstly, it takes a brief look at the growth and development of community education in Ireland. Secondly, it explores the impact of community education on learning in a post-modern knowledge based society. Finally, it traces the role it has played in the emergence of communitarianism as a social movement in Ireland

Theorising Creative Critical Pedagogy: the art of politicised agency

Radical educators in Ireland considered adult education as the Cinderella of the education world, cleaning up in the basement, away from public domain of privilege and pleasure. In many ways, the metaphor remains appropriate with a slight lens shift; adult education is flourishing in small, local arenas, where it is easier to adhere to the ethos and principles of emancipatory adult and community education out of the glare of public scrutiny. The metaphor is also appropriate, at a stretch, in terms of the feminist saturation of critical pedagogy, and the reflexivity required connecting the personal and political. Further, the underpinning rationale also includes the task of interrogating the academic, with an eye to the role of furthering emancipatory education, rather than bolstering the status quo. This article will look at critical practice, developed not just in adult education but in community development, and at all levels of popular education, in particular praxis that stems from the arts. I will look at the thinking that underpins praxis, and explore micro-macro integration, in order to comprehend the development of agency, maintaining structural analyses. I suggest that creativity is an essential element of critical pedagogy, to equip educators and students with the resources needed to counteract myriad forces against equality and justice and the imagination to create an alternative. Finally, I will argue that we need to develop our own creativity, to extend our repertoires of organic intellectual engagement

Community Education: Perspectives from the Margins

This article delineates community education by exploring the wider contexts underlying the field. It associates community education with adult education, popular education, and community development. It reviews the historical bases from radical workers' education to empowering self-help. It depicts the facets of community education arising from these sources, and links praxis – the dynamics of methods and knowledge bases – with critical citizenship and democracy. It provides an overview of the applications of community education, from community building to consciousness raising, and from health education to human rights, to illuminate its scope and use, with examples drawn from the South and North

Saint Bob and me

The experience of womens community education in Ireland grew out of the struggle to overcome the effects of colonisation, political and religious, and helped to forge a lasting alliance with the poor and oppressed of the world, writes BRID CONNOLL

Adult and Community Education: A Model for Higher Education?

Any discussion about the nature and meaning of higher education has to take place in the context of enormous changes in society, probably on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. However, while the Industrial Revolution was driven by the economy as a social institution, with subsequent social and cultural transformations, the knowledge revolution is driven by technology and social change pivoting on democratisation. As a society, we are moving closer to individuation, within community and the social, amid discourses that construct our sense of reality and of our identities. This article will consider the key question for higher education: in what way ought it serve society? For those who defer to market forces, the value will be in terms of laws of economics, profit and loss. However, the meaning and value of higher education is underpinned by a basic ideological stance, if the answer includes priority for fostering places and environments for learning and scholarship in order to improve, ultimately, the lives of people in society. This is the position that I take, in my work in adult and community education. In this article I will consider the parallels between liberation movements-such as the women's movement--and adult and community education, as adult and community education has developed over the past twenty years in Ireland. The women's movement, for example, has been pivotal in changing discourses around femininity and masculinity, problematizing both, but simultaneously enabling individual women and groups of women to reflect critically about their individual lives, drawing conclusions and insights that may be generalised, not only to the total cohort of women as a group (if such an entity can be said to exist), but also translated, as it were, for other oppressed or marginalized groups.' The article will draw on the learning from social movements to illuminate the place of citizenship education, in the context of radical humanistic discourses conducted through lifelong learning, Finally, it will argue that higher education, underpinned by the moral positioning around justice and equality, could learn fiom this model, in order to reassert the meaning and value of its role in society

Adult education in times of crises: from Trojan Horses to New Ethics

Abstract included in text

Déjà Vu: The story so far (right)

In the process of writing this article, I reflected on my experience of the transformation of Ireland from an avowedly theocratic state, to one that has been the first in the world to vote for marriage equality by a margin of two to one. In addition, Leo Varadkar, the current Taoiseach, that is, Prime Minister, is openly gay, and his father was from India. Further, five years ago, in 2018, Ireland voted by 66.4% to 33.6% with a turnout of almost 65% to delete an anti-abortion clause in the Constitution of Ireland following a long and arduous campaign (Fitzsimons, 2021)

Review Of Boni, Alexjandra And Walker, Melanie, (editors), Human Development And Capabilities: Re-imagining The University Of The Twenty-first Century

Abstract is available in the text

Theorizing Radical Practice: Community Arts and Transformative Learning

This roundtable presentation provides an exploration of the role that creative, critical teaching and learning could play in addressing social and personal suffering through reflective practice, expressive ways of knowing and cultural resistance. It will draw on Freirean pedagogy, and feminist, critical and community theory to propose the way ahead

Community Development and Adult Education: Prospects for change?

This article will look at the origins of community developmnent and its role in addressing social issues such as poverty, unemployment and the unequal position of women. It will assess the part adult education plays in community development. Finally, it will consider if the current main trends in community development in Ireland succeeds in bringing about social change which is liberating rather than domesticating