How and why minoritised communities self-organise education: a review study

ABSTRACT

Minoritised communities have a long history of self-organising learning to meet their youth’s varied educational needs. Community education is a widespread societal phenomenon, yet a conceptual framework mapping the diversity of educational initiatives remained lacking. We bring together the body of academic work on community education in a systematic literature review and extract an array of cases. By regarding these cases through a conceptual framework based on their organisational form and their main objectives, we distinguish different types of community education and we deduce that different communities have different needs, which translate into different intended purposes. Distinguishing similarities and differences in community education across communities and countries is a necessary step in acknowledging the resourcefulness of minoritised communities in self-organising education, which is pertinent for stakeholders of community schools as well as for those researching community educational spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Community education
• community learning
• community participation
• comparative analysis
• systematic reviews

Acknowledgments

This article has benefitted greatly from the extensive feedback of the two anonymous referees. Their detailed comments have greatly improved our paper. We also would like to thank Maurits Meijers and Rob Gruijters for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The analysis relies on case descriptions as portrayed in the articles examined in the systematic literature review. As not all authors provide exact details of the cases, it cannot be ruled out that there is some degree of overlap in the cases discussed in the articles by the same author. Yet, as this contribution’s emphasis lies on the ways in which the cases are discussed in the literature, this does not affect the substantive results.

2. The communities included were the following: African, Armenian, Bangladeshi, Bengali, Black, Bulgarian/Albanian, Chinese, Farsi, Greek, Gujarati, Gujarati, Hmong, Hungarian, Indian, Iranian, Japanese, Jewish, Khmer, Korean, Kosovo-Albanian, Latino, Maltese, Mennonites, Muslim, Pakistani, Polish, Punjabi, Sikh, Slovenian, Somali, Swedish, Taiwanese, Tamil, Thai, Travellers, Turkish, Vietnamese.

3. Racism in mainstream education was often mentioned in the extracted articles and we therefore inductively added it as a code for analysis purposes. In 22 of the 71 cases (30%), racism in mainstream education was discussed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Antwerp, funding number DOCPRO4 [43308].