Toward an Empowerment Model of Community Education in China

We define community education as organized lifelong learning through voluntary participation in collective efforts to critically address both individual and community needs. Community education has roots in European folk schools, United States participatory democracy, and Latin American “popular education.” Community education developed more recently in China in response to Learning Society and Lifelong Education policy. We present a new framework of community education that includes a theoretical component, emphasizing learning and participation principles. The organizational component includes traditional and nontraditional schools and other local organizations engaged in community education. The program component includes community service, empowerment, and combined models. We also apply the framework to an ecological-psychopolitical model of community education, which considers multilevel (individual, organizational, community/societal) processes of liberation or empowerment across four environmental domains or forms of capital: sociocultural, physical, economic and political. We conclude by examining two brief ethnographic case studies of community education in Shanghai, China.