The phrase it takes a village to raise a child implies that to form an adult, a child must adopt many different lessons from many different people in their surroundings. In other words, personalities are not formed just under the influence of the immediate family but the entire community.
A similar principle can be applied to the education of children and young adults, yet, this principle is often not seen this way. Instead, education is, once again, interpreted as a matter concerning the parents in question. It’s the job of parents to choose and finance a child’s education, while the community takes a passive, if any, role in this whole ordeal.
While it’s clear that this is a suboptimal scenario, what can the community do, begin with? How can a community get involved? Well, here are some suggestions that might serve as a great starting point.
How to Get Community More Involved?
The first thing worth considering is how to get the community more involved. The question is that you need to start bottom up. Here are a couple of ideas that you need to consider.
Get student families more involved
The term community can be interpreted in many different ways. The immediate community of every student is their family and primary caregivers. So, how can they become more involved? Well, first, through regular communication between them and the teaching staff.
They should call to ask about the grades and inquire about the attendance of the students. Then, seeing as how education is a continuous process with many stages, they might want to show more interest in the next educational institution that the student is going to be engaged in. For instance, questions about college enrollment should be taken quite seriously.
This is a two-way street. Schools can also do quite a bit to engage these parents. For instance, they could be more transparent and accessible. They could also inquire about the family situation even before a child becomes an issue. One way to establish this collaboration early on is to create parent and family advocacy groups.
Use the fact that the school is an educational institution
While an improvised workshop or a course can be incredibly effective, you need to take advantage of the fact that the school is already an educational institution. There’s so much equipment there, and an open-door day at a school can make so much difference in their lives.
In a school, you can start a project-based program quite naturally. You can also establish interdisciplinary collaborations to show students that things they learn usually aren’t applied as a standalone. This alone can help them understand that the things they learn have real-life applications, which already helps with their intrinsic motivation.
Other than this, you can turn it all into a competency-based learning experience. Just like with regular curriculums, they have to finish one course to unlock the next one. You can make tests to serve as checkpoints.
Involve local businesses
Local businesses can help improve the quality of the program in many different ways. First, businesses employ experts, meaning they can contribute by sending professionals as guest lecturers. Next, they can sponsor events, make donations to schools, or even start open-day events and internship programs.
The truth is that you can even contact a business specializing in K-12 education programs. Through educational programming as a service, you can make the most significant possible difference in the community by delivering premium educational content on demand. Not to mention that handling the marketing behind this is, on its own, quite challenging.
Try to Increase Involvement
Keep in mind that while some of this increase in involvement can take place spontaneously, a lot of times, you’ll need to give the whole situation a bit of a push. Here are a couple of ideas worth trying out.
Workshops organized by professionals
Workshops are a unique didactical method for several reasons. They provide you with a hands-on-training on the current topic. More often than not, they are used to reach nontraditional audiences and explore uncommon didactic techniques.
The key to a workshop is to provide a teaching environment in which participants will be able to express their creativity. In other words, they’re guided by professionals and aided in discovering ideas on their own. They are then tutored on how to use this idea to their benefit.
Most importantly, workshops provide a fail-safe environment where various ideas and experiments can be tested without dangerous repercussions. Having a person of significance hold the workshop can help generate more interest within the community.
Student volunteering in local charities or non-profits
So far, you might have concluded that the burden of effort falls on the organization. In reality, students can be encouraged to make an effort to volunteer for local charities and non-profits.
First of all, this is an ethical thing and helps build character. We’re already making an effort to build a better world, so why not implement some of these goals into our young, as well? Second, it helps give these students a sample of what it’s like to have a real-life responsibility, which is an invaluable experience.
Keep in mind that this is also a way to make a difference, which is something that millennials and younger generations are quite interested in. Besides this, they also get to socialize and meet people with similar values/inclinations.
Not to mention that every task requires you to master a specific skill. For students engaging in something like this for the first time, this will undoubtedly involve a learning experience.
Wrap Up
Better education makes for better people only if it’s molded by a healthy community. To ensure that all of these factors hold, you need to ensure that the community gets actively involved in this educational process. It’s also essential that this takes place in every layer of the community. For instance, you can’t expect the entire local community to care about education if the parents don’t. As we’ve said, it takes a village and a lot of effort, but the result is more than worth it.
