In Community Education Curriculum, learners are encouraged to actively apply concepts and information, skills or attitudes to local situations. Curricular experiences can challenge students to identify and consider why parts of their neighborhoods are in such disrepair and their role in continuing such inequity to exist or desist. For example, students would not just study pollution, but would be encouraged and provided with the opportunity to observe, examine and hopefully reverse pollution of pond water at local levels through a variety of actions. Multi-age teams of learners would investigate and act together in terms of community improvement.

In CEC, the emphasis is to provide supervised, educational experiences where learners of all ages can immediately apply some aspect of the concept studied. Study does not end with the giving of a final examination or grading of a research paper, but would extend classroom activity to include an action-oriented experiment in order to observe concepts and theories in action.

In the old way of teaching, if educators are designing a Language Arts unit related to biography, it is likely they would devise objectives to indicate mastery of the skills of writing or interviewing for or evaluation of biographies.

When the community educator is designing this unit, then objectives would be evident to indicate expected skill or attitude development and expectations related to the discovery of how individuals contribute to the quality of community life. A unit on the collecting and writing of biographies would focus on the production of local biographies and some part of the bio-study would emphasize how these individuals helped to bring positive change in their locality and the lives of people.

These projects do not need to be complicated. They work well in all curricular areas. For example, elementary school students could design and display posters telling about an endangered building. These junior designers will see that their work is more purposeful when displayed to the community. They also see that classroom work can be shown to have a direct link to and influence on the neighborhoods they currently inhabit and will inherit in the future.

Curriculum Goes Beyond Skills

This is not to create an either/or forced choice where community members might fear that students would no longer be required to learn specific knowledge skills or attitudes. However, the emphasis extends beyond mastery of knowledge, skills or attitudes and extends into areas of what has been called active social reconstruction: that is, creating positive nurturing intentional communities which actively demonstrate a respectful reverence for all life forms. Thus, the design of curricular experiences is not just intended to convey subject matter, but to also provide opportunities to do something in the community, whether the chosen action is to reduce waste in landfills, help an endangered building or befriend the aged or the lonely.