A Culture of Lifelong Learning is Crucial for Sustainable Economic Development
PROJECT FOUNDATION
One of the project tenets is based on UNESCO's Global Network of Learning Cities Initiative. CLICK HERE for further information.
The project will be guided and informed by the Learning Cities initiative supplemented with appreciative inquiry and authentic learning practices.
MORE HARD TRUTH
20 to 39%
Several Mid Mon Valley Municipalities' Poverty Rate
Bottom 25%
Rank of several Environmental Justice school districts in the Mid Mon Valley area
85%
Percentage of Pittsburgh homes built before 1978 and having lead-related issues.
79%
Percentage of people living in poverty in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan area.
PROJECT GOALS
Strengthen each municipality's members - especially the vulnerable populations - such that they become co-creators and producers of positive social and environmental change.
Improve each community's adults’ community literacy knowledge and skills to understand environmental and airborne hazards to maintain their children's health, safety, and academic achievement.
Movement of the community's adults from survival learning to community learning and ideally a culture of lifelong learning.
For the community's adults have the knowledge, efficacy, and skill to be a community leader and teacher of their children.
PROJECT METHODS
PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH (PAR)
Collaborating with each community's stakeholders, the research focus, design, procedures, and data collection/analyses protocols will be developed.
PAR reflects questioning about the nature of knowledge and the extent to which knowledge can represent the interests of the powerful and serve to reinforce their positions in society.
Open stakeholder discussion throughout the project such that all ideas and perspectives are heard and considered. Multiple perspectives and understanding lead to a more integrative and deeper approach to developing and offering community literacy and learning programs.
Program outcomes development led by the community's stakeholders. The collaboratively developed program outcomes are the base from which community programs will be developed.
CLICK HERE for more information on Backwards Design (opens as a PDF download)
STAKEHOLDER INVOLVEMENT
CBREE collaborates with existing groups in their respective communities, community leaders, religious leaders, business leaders, and elected officials for strengthening vulnerable and impoverished communities.
Stakeholders have knowledge of their communities that is valuable to better understand the culture and traditions embedded within the community. Stakeholders can also share knowledge about community interests and concerns as well as the nuances within the community and among the families.
Among the benefits of collaboration are relevant culturally responsive community leadership through biography-driven engagement. The professional development workshops provide knowledge, skills, and strategies to best engage with vulnerable populations.
Leadership “encourages change, even pushes for it, especially when the status quo demeans people or fails to give them opportunities to employ fully their experience and talents."
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Found in Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice by Preskill and Brookfield (2009, p.4)