posted on 2020-11-30, 19:47authored byMARTIN BRENNAN
This paper presents an historical framework of community education
concepts with roots in Flint, Michigan (USA) and an early Melbourne,
Victoria (Australia) example of a school as a community hub: the Princes
Hill School Park Centre. The writer’s reflective narrative reveals
experience of a rich history of interaction between schools,
communities, and local government, all fostering place-based
neighbourhood decision making. It demonstrates the radical moves that
were made to expand the concept of community education, from community
use of school facilities to community empowerment and resilience. In the
context of reviewing the current largely untapped potential of schools
as community hubs, the term ‘Rear Vision’ emerged, reflecting a sense of
‘looking back to look forward’. The experience of community education
in the 1980s in Michigan and Melbourne, Victoria, can inform how
‘schools as community hubs’ embraced the building of new connections. In
the 1980s, the Princes Hill School Park Centre adopted a community
empowerment model reflecting the need to move beyond the use of school
facilities and instead radically engage the school, local community and
the local government in a range of activities that promoted and
facilitated participatory decision-making. The history of the community
education movement provides evidence that broadening the role of schools
beyond the use of their facilities can build connections, resilience
and participatory decision-making in a post pandemic and increasingly
fractured world.