Abstract:

Community education is an educational approach that emerges in the last third of the last century. It comes up in a variety of contexts, where the link between education and community becomes essential to face the negative outcomes resulting from globalization: both a crisis of collective identities and an increase of inequalities.

Community education was not born to solve an educational problem from society, but to solve a social problem from education. It starts up from the educability of every individual when he is in group and, to a certain extent, becomes the alternative non-formal education of the current non-formal education. All the different approaches to community education point out the urgent need to reconstruct the strong social sense of education. The individualization of education prevents the construction of collective identities based on recognition and permanent construction, and multiplies the probabilities of reproduction and maintenance of inequalities between subjects.

This communication is the output of a document analysis and a literature review on this topic, as well as the input from some training experiences on community education for social educators. First, we introduce the two hegemonic orientations of community education today: on the one hand, a post-colonial approach, which wants to end the colonization of knowledge made by a "western" hegemony, and does it claiming the underlying meaning of the logos of communities with a collective identity. On the other hand, a post-industrial approach, which wants to end the colonization of technology and the digital divide that it implies for disadvantaged sectors.

Secondly, we also want to meet the substantial limitations and contradictions on community education in the light of social reality and its dynamics, and point out a set of prevailing factors that allow an optimal development. For this reason, some prior processes are required to set up a bunch of pre-conditions for real community education.

Finally, we propose an action-research model to build up these optimal pre-conditions, which is based on a logical sequence of both individual and collective learning. The community education process based on an action-research model is always challenging to the participants, as well as for the groups, and facilitate that the risks and limitations can be neutralized.

Keywords:

Community education, globalization, post-colonialism, action-research, training.