Community-Based Learning
Community-based learning refers to a wide variety of instructional methods and programs that educators use to connect what is being taught in the homeschool environment to their surrounding communities, including local institutions, history, literature, cultural heritage, and natural environments.
Community-based learning is also motivated by the belief that all communities have intrinsic educational assets and resources that educators can use to enhance learning experiences for children.
Advocates of place-based learning generally argue that students will be more interested in the subjects and concepts being taught, and they will be more inspired to learn, if academic study is connected to concepts, issues, and contexts that are more familiar, understandable, accessible, or personally relevant to them.
By using the “community as a classroom,” endorsers would argue, educators can improve knowledge retention, skill acquisition, and preparation for adult life because students can be given more opportunities apply learning in practical, real-life settings—by researching a local ecosystem, for example, or by volunteering at a nonprofit organization that is working to improve the world in some meaningful way.
While the methods and forms of place-based education are both sophisticated and numerous, the concept is perhaps most readily described in terms of four general approaches (all of which might be pursued independently or combined with other approaches):
Instructional Connections:
In this form of community-based learning, educators would make explicit and purposeful connections between the material being taught at home and local issues, contexts, and concepts.
For example:
The workings of a democratic political system may be described in terms of a local political process;
Statistics and probability may be taught using stats from a local sports team;
A scientific concept may be explained using an example taken from a local habitat or ecosystem;
or The Civil War may be taught using examples and stories drawn from local history.
In this scenario, students may still be educated within the house walls,
but community-related connections are being used to enhance student understanding or engagement in the learning process.
Community Integration:
In this approach, educators might take advantage of local experts by inviting them to give presentations, participate in panel discussions, or mentor students who are working on a long-term research project via zoom meetings or in person.
Students may also partner with a local organization or group to provide additional learning experiences in the home or local hall with other homeschoolers.
For example:
A local engineering firm or scientific institution may help the children to develop a robotics program or judge science-fair projects.
In this scenario, students are still being educated within the house walls, but community resources and authorities are being used to enhance the learning experience.
Community participation:
In this approach, students would learn, at least in part, by actively participating in their community.
For example, students may undertake a research project on a local environmental problem in collaboration with a scientist or nonprofit organization;
participate in an internship or job-shadowing program at a local business for which they can earn academic credit or recognition;
volunteer at a local nonprofit or advocacy campaign during which they conduct related research, write a paper, or produce a documentary on what they learned;
or they may interview doctors, urgent-care professionals, health-insurance executives, and individuals in the community to learn about the practical challenges faced when attending health-care facilities.
In this scenario, students are learning both within and outside of the house walls, and participatory community-based-learning experiences would be connected in some way to the homeschool’s academic program.
Citizen action:
This approach would be considered by some experts and educators to be the fullest or most “authentic” realization of community-based learning—students not only learn from and in their community, but they also use what they are learning to influence, change, or give back to the community in some meaningful way.
For example:
Students may write a regular column for the local newspaper (rather than simply turning in their writing to an educator);
research an environmental or social problem and then create an online petition or deliver a presentation to the city council with the goal of influencing local policy;
or volunteer for a local nonprofit and create an multimedia presentation, citizen-action campaign, or short documentary intended to raise awareness in their community about a particular cause.
In this scenario, the audience for and potential beneficiaries of a student’s learning products would extend beyond teachers, educators, mentors, and other peers to include community organizations and the general public.
Community-based learning is considered a way for educators to enhance the concepts being taught by connecting them to personal, first-hand experiences and familiar, accessible examples.
In this way, community-based learning is often positioned as an alternative to more traditional forms of learning in which students may read about people, places, or events they have never experienced or to concepts that can only be understood abstractly.
War is a common concept taught in history lessons, for example, but it’s not something that is commonly experienced by most children — and, consequently, the effects and implications of war may not be fully felt or grasped.
A community-based approach to teaching students about war might entail visiting a war memorial that lists the names of local soldiers who died in combat, interviewing local veterans about their experiences, researching how a particular war affected their local community, or hosting discussions with a veteran’s group or a recently arrived refugee who relocated to the community from a war-torn area.
Community-based learning is also promoted as a way to develop stronger relationships between the individual and their community, while also increasing the community’s investment in, understanding of, and support for homeschoolers and the learning experiences it provides.
For example:
Homeschool-reform proposals may be met with skepticism, criticism, or resistance from the local community, particularly if they are misunderstood or misinterpreted.
Yet if a significant percentage of community members are meaningfully involved in this new approach to educating homeschooled students,
participating community members would not only have a stronger understanding of the strategies being implemented, and of why the new teaching approaches are being adopted, but they would also be able to help other community members better understand the reforms.
Authentic Learning
In education, the term authentic learning refers to a wide variety of educational and instructional techniques focused on connecting what students are taught in the home environment to real-world issues, problems, and applications.
The basic idea is that students are more likely to be interested in what they are learning, more motivated to learn new concepts and skills, and better prepared to succeed in tertiary education, careers, and adulthood if what they are learning mirrors real-life contexts, equips them with practical and useful skills, and addresses topics that are relevant and applicable to their lives outside of their school years.
An “authentic” way to teach the scientific method, for example, would be to ask students to develop a hypothesis about how ecosystems work that is based on first-hand observations of a local natural habitat, then have them design and conduct an experiment to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
After the experiment is completed, students might then write up, present, and defend their findings to a panel of actual scientists.
In contrast, a “less authentic” way to teach the scientific method would be to have students read about the concept in a textbook, memorize the prescribed process, and then take a multiple-choice test to determine how well they remember it.
In the “authentic” learning example above, students “learn by doing,” and they acquire the foundational skills, knowledge, and understanding that working scientists actually need and use in their profession.
In this case, students would also learn related skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, formal scientific observation, note taking, research methods, writing, presentation techniques, and public speaking, for example.
In the “less authentic” learning situation, students acquire knowledge largely for purposes of getting a good grade on a test.
As a result, students may be less likely to remember what they learned because the concept remains abstract, theoretical, or disconnected from first-hand experience.
And since students were never required to use what they learned in a real-life situation, educators won’t be able to determine if students can translate what they have learned into the practical skills, applications, and habits of mind that would be useful in life. — such as in a future job, for example.
Another principle of authentic learning is that it mirrors the complexities and ambiguities of real life.
On a multiple-choice science test there are “right” answers and “wrong” answers determined by teachers and test developers.
But when it comes to actual scientific theories and findings, for example, there are often many potentially correct answers that may be extremely difficult, or even impossible, to unequivocally prove or disprove.
For this reason, authentic learning tends to be designed around open-ended questions without clear right or wrong answers, or around complex problems with many possible solutions that could be investigated using a wide variety of methods.
Authentic learning is also more likely to be “interdisciplinary,” given that life, understanding, and knowledge are rarely compartmentalized into subject areas, and as adults students will have to apply multiple skills or domains of knowledge in any given educational, career, civic, or life situation.
Generally speaking, authentic learning is intended to encourage students to think more deeply, raise hard questions, consider multiple forms of evidence, recognize nuances, weigh competing ideas, investigate contradictions, or navigate difficult problems and situations.
In perhaps its purest expression, authentic learning culminates in students making some form of genuinely useful contribution to their community or to a field of study.
For example:
A science lesson might revolve around the study of water conservation, conducting an analysis of water usage in the home, investigate potential ways the family might reduce its usage, and then present a water-conservation proposal that includes a variety of recommendations — e.g., posting signs in bathrooms encouraging others not to leave water running, installing low-flow faucets with automatic on-off sensors, using rain barrels below drain spouts, planting drought-resistant plants in the yard that are watered using the collected rainwater, etc.
Once these solutions are put into practice, students might conduct observations to calculate how much water the house conserves on a daily, weekly, or annual basis, and then develop a website, infographics, or videos to share the information with peers, family, friedns and the broader community.
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