Community schooling is an effective way to respond to the challenge of quality education at the international, national and local levels of society. It expands the traditional roles of public schools by creating relationships between home, school, and community. Individuals enhance their lives and communities through community education, which provides opportunities for learning and collaboration. It impacts everyone from local community members, schools, government, families, and neighbors, to individuals. At the heart of community schooling is the ability for an individual and the entire community to become lifelong learners. Through community schooling, citizens can develop relationships and problem solving skills to conquer the diverse challenges facing our society. The major principles of community schooling include
1. Lifelong Learning
2. Self-determination
3. Self-help
4. Leadership Development
5. Institutional Responsiveness
6. Integrated Delivery of Services
7. Localization
8. Maximum use of Resources
9. Inclusiveness
10.Access to Public Information
Hats off and salute to those volunteers and teachers who are risking their lives but are not compromising with education. It’s all because of the Department of Education in J&K and a big thanks to Principal Secretary Education Dr.Asgar Samoon and other helmsmen who have not left any stone unturned in smoothening the teaching-learning process .
Encourage increased use of community resources and volunteers to augment the basic educational program. Develop educational partnerships between schools and public and private service providers, business and industry, and civic and social service organizations. Use public education facilities as community service centers for meeting the educational, social, health, cultural, and recreational needs of all ages and sectors of the community. Develop an environment that fosters lifelong learning. Establish a process for involving the community in educational planning and decision making. Provide a responsive, community-based system for collective action by all educational and community agencies to address community issues. Develop a system that facilitates home-school-community communication. The purpose of community learning and development is to develop the capacity of individuals and groups of all ages through their actions, the capacity of communities, to improve their quality of life. … The latter is known as the formal education system, whereas community education is sometimes called informal education. Community education offers a structured, effective way to respond to the challenge of improving public education because it expands the school’s traditional role and creates a mutually interdependent relationship between the people at home, school, and community. Community education has three basic components–lifelong learning opportunities, community involvement in schools, and efficient use of resources–and is based on a set of ten broad principles enumerated below :
Lifelong Learning: Education is a birth-to-death process, and everyone in the community shares the responsibility of educating all members of the community. Formal and informal learning opportunities should be available to residents of all ages in a wide variety of community settings.
Self-determination: Community residents have a right and a responsibility to be involved in assessing community needs and identifying community resources that can be used to address those needs.
Self-help: People are best served by their leaders when their capacity to help themselves is acknowledged and developed. When people assume responsibility for their own well-being, they achieve some degree of independence.
Leadership: Training local leaders in problem solving, decision-making, and group-process skills is essential to community improvement efforts.
Institutional Responsiveness: As public institutions exist to serve the public, they are obligated to develop programs and services that address constantly changing public needs and interests.
Integrated delivery of services: Organizations and agencies that operate for the public good can best use their limited resources, meet their own goals, and serve the public by collaborating with organizations and agencies with similar goals and purposes.
Localization: Community services, programs, and volunteery opportunities close to people’s homes have the greatest potential for high levels of public participation.
Maximum use of resources: The physical, financial, and human resources of every community should be fully available and rationally interconnected if the diverse needs and interests of the community are to be met.
Inclusiveness: Community programs, activities, and services should involve the broadest possible cross-section of community residents without segregation by age, income, sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or other characteristics.
Access to public information” Public information should be shared across agency and organization lines because an effective community not only has “the facts,” but it also knows what those facts mean in the lives of the people who make up the community.
A Comprehensive Plan: The current lack of confidence in public education has been more pervasive and prolonged than the crisis in confidence that followed the launch of Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviet Union. Community education has become the approach of choice of many educators who are determined to improve the public confidence in schools and to build partnerships in support of public education. Community education is a way of looking at public education as a total community enterprise. A community education program is a comprehensive and coordinated plan for providing educational, recreational, social, and cultural services for all people in the community. The following strategies provide a framework for developing such a program. The strategies have overlapping characteristics and functions, but taken together, they outline a comprehensive action plan.
Strategy 1: Encourage increased use of community resources and volunteers to augment the basic educational program. Every community has human, physical, and financial resources that can be used to enrich and expand traditional education programs. Community resources and volunteers have been used to expand curricular options, conduct field and study trips, offer various kinds of tutoring, sponsor student-based enterprises, and support experiential learning.
Strategy 2: Develop educational partnerships between schools and public and private service providers, business and industry, and civic and social service organizations. Complex, often interrelated, social and economic problems create a broad array of service needs in many communities, and meeting them effectively is likely to require more resources than any single agency or organization can provide. The development of partnerships for cooperative use of available resources will help prevent unnecessary duplication in the delivery of such services as child care, after-school programs, drug education and treatment, literacy and remedial programs, internships and work-study programs, and career awareness activities.
Strategy 3: Use public education facilities as community service centers for meeting the educational, social, health, cultural, and recreational needs of all ages and sectors of the community. Since community attitudes and support affect the schools’ ability to carry out their mission to educate all children. I belong to district kupwara, Education Zone Mawar where we have teachers who are delivering offline, online, voice and community classes per day even on Sundays and holidays. Students are grasping and learning in natural atmosphere, in meadows, under trees and near fresh water. It’s a well come step and we should appreciate this technique in such situations as covid 19 is now spreading very quickly. Hats off and salute to those volunteers and teachers who are risking their lives but are not compromising with education. It’s all because of the Department of Education in J&K and a big thanks to Principal Secretary Education Dr.Asgar Samoon and other helmsmen who have not left any stone unturned in smoothening the teaching-learning process .In my Zone also the teachers remain on their toes to improve the standards of teaching learning process. .Its because of that why zone mawar is always on top in the district in virtual teaching-learning process. All our resource persons and teachers in particular are giving their best. In Sha Allah we will touch heights in teaching-learning process.
(The author is working teacher presently posted in Education Zone Mawar of Kupwara district .View are his own)[email protected]