Community-based education is a set of learning strategies that are used by teachers in order to connect young students with the community to address a problem or work toward a solution to a community problem. This type of learning is beneficial for both, the students, as well as the community as students, are gaining valuable practical knowledge which assists them in overall development, on the other hand, it helps the community to work toward solving problems that will ultimately benefit them.
Types of Community Based Education
- Civic action or advocacy – In this students only address the community problems or social issue and what is the cause of that problem. This is basically informational community-based learning.
- Direct service – In this method Students directly work with the community and collectively work toward solutions to that problems
- Indirect Service – In this method students provide goods & products for the needy cause of the community.
Challenges for Community Based Education
- Community-based education is not as same as classroom-based Learning as that can be managed easily but community-based education is quite challenging and its workload is much higher for the teachers and the students.
- Students and Teachers will be working directly with the community for solving a real-world problem but it is not easy as it sounds as it can be confusing and chaotic for the students. Students can get annoyed with the higher workload and they can be unsure of their learning goals in community-based education some of the boarding schools in India use best practices for students to reduce the higher workload that arrived due to community-based learning methods.
- Teachers or instructors will have a hard time managing the project as they have to manage the project as well as manage the students and on top of that, they have to evaluate the performance of each student and check if they have done their part in the project.
- Community-Based Education can be time-consuming as it will be difficult for instructors and students to finish the task in time.
Benefits of Community Based Education
- This type of learning strategy is very engaging for the students as they move out of the classroom environment and get in direct contact with the community and work toward a social cause in order to provide help to the community, this will make students’ engagement level go up and they will be able to learn, understand the information and quickly grasp the new knowledge.
- Community-Based Education can help students develop creativity, critical thinking, and problems solving skills as they directly working toward solving real-world problems so in order to achieve that they have to think critically and out of the box and this process will enhance their skills which will be helpful for them as the there is a lot of demand for these skill in Marketplace.
- Community-Based Education enhances the social responsibility of the students as they dig deeper in understanding the social issue it causes. It helps them become a better citizen as they will take the responsibility to help other people and solve community problems.
- In Community Based Learning Students receive practical knowledge as they already get theoretical knowledge in classroom-based learning so they can utilize that knowledge to gain practical experience.
- Develop empathy in students, when students work with the locals, understand their problems, and work toward helping them without any judgment.
- It makes students more confident about themselves and they can take risks and accept new challenges as community-based education offers new experiences to them which makes them ready to take new tasks or challenges in hand.
- It also enhances students’ leadership skills, communications skills, and team working skills as they do a collaborative task that requires teamwork and good communication so community-based education enhances these key skills in students which they will carry lifelong.
- It will change the student’s attitude toward social problems as now instead of ignoring the problems they will try to solve the problem.
Teachers should mix up learning technique in order to provide good overall knowledge to students as theoretical knowledge is necessary for the students but they should also focus on providing real work experience by making them solve real-world problems as they will get more engaged with the information as well develop critical Thinking and problem-solving skills.
