Allannah:

My name is Allannah Murphy I'm the coordinator of the CLC at James Lyng, it's a project that we have been engaged in under different names and titles for about 6 or 7 years.

Miriam: What is community learning?

Allannah:

Community learning is a concept that involves a more holistic approach to education, particularly of adolescents. The theory behind it is that school can sometimes be a place that's separate from a students life that they would learn better if the circumstances in their surrounding area became part of their learning, so the idea is to get them out of the building as often as possible and into the community, and to bring the community resources into the building as much as possible too. So you have a kind of a steady stream back and forth between real-life and school-life.

Miriam: Can you tell me a bit about the goals and outcomes that are part of the community-learning project?

Allannah:

The goals of community learning centres are specific both to the youth themselves that are involved in the community and to their families and the wider community. In general the beginning of a community-learning centre involves bringing in the community to ask them what their perceptions are of what's needed, to do an assets mapping, to look at some of the gaps in services that are being offered in the community. Which is what we did when we began the community learning centre here, we had a town hall where we invited as many community organizations and members as we could. They came up with a series of about 3 or 4 objectives to do with employability, healthy lifestyles, and improvement in learning outcomes. And so when we began to tailor our programs, those were the things that were informing us at each step of the way.

In terms of outcomes, of course you want to have full employment, you want to have um … complete graduation rates, you wanna have people engaged in healthy activities with a goal of life-long learning. It's a long process though.