Best Education Practice: Community RSS Feed

See below for: research findings about outreach with a community.

For the Community, the learning experience:

  • Builds on locally existing skills and resources.
  • Supports a person who takes responsibility for managing or leading the process, and relies on quality group planning and facilitation techniques.
  • Is flexible in response to both process and conditions.
  • Provides participants with feedback about the results of their actions.
  • Generates and makes use of data about the local condition.
  • Takes into consideration the community as a whole, including: socio-political, economic, historical, and cultural influences.
  • Evolves from work with a coalition or group.
  • Builds effectiveness through linkages to other communities, partners, and resources.
  • Takes place close to the location where people practice a behavior of concern.
  • Reaches people in multiple ways.
  • Relates to long-term community vision and goals.
  • Provides training to increase skills needed to accomplish goals identified by the group.

Findings Navigation: Browse by Audience; Browse by Theme; Browse by Best Education Practice; Browse by multiple topics

Hartley, T. W. (2006) Finding 1

To increase US public acceptance of water reuse, such as high awareness of treatment technology, trust in local government; and of the challenges and opportunities of water reuse in the US:

  • Manage diverse types of information in order to serve the interests of all stakeholders, and ensure equal access of information, in order to promote learning and communication, and to build mutual understanding among all stakeholders.
  • Nurture multiple motives for the public to engage, demonstrate genuine commitment to hear the public’s voice.
  • Promote communication and public dialog in multiple forms and venues in all stages of decision making.
  • Ensure decisions made are fair, sound, and reasonable.
  • Build and maintain trust among decision makers and the general public.

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Habron, G. B., Kaplowitz, M. D., & Levine, R. L. (2004) Finding 1

Capture the social dynamics of grounds maintenance operations units including social, physical, and environmental responses to watershed management concerns to reveal key decision-making points in the system. Develop a framework of these dynamics, to illustrate activities needed to implement sustainable watershed and environmental management at large institutions. Continue reading →

Ghanbarpour, M. R., Hipel, K. W., & Abbaspour, K. C. (2005) Finding 2

In the long-term watershed planning process, assess and analyse different stakeholders’ preferences in order to prioritize various strategies and alternatives. For example, use an analytical hierarchy process (AHP) or a social choice function (SCF) process. The analytical hierarchy process is best used with expert groups and includes (1) the structuring of a problem into a hierarchy consisting of a goal and subordinate features, (2) pairwise comparisons between elements at each level, and (3) propagation of level-specific, local priorities to global priorities. The intensity of preference between any two elements is assessed by integers ranging from 1 to 9 (Saaty, 1980, 1990).  The social choice function is based on pairwise comparisons on the number of voters between pairs of strategies. It assumes that all assertions of preference between two strategies carry equal weight. Continue reading →

Ballard, D. (2005) Finding 1

A model of the change process required for sustainability, involves 3 conditions: (1) Awareness of the agenda, scale, urgency and structure of the issues, (2) Identifying effective roles for individuals or groups, where meaningful activities can be undertaken in parallel to raising awareness, (3) Association or cooperation with others to mobilize towards empowerment. Continue reading →

Adams, J., Kraft, S., Ruhl, J. B., Lant, C., Loftus, T., & Duram, L. (2005) Finding 1

As watershed organizations develop, facilitate a form of governance that is democratic and able to generate outcomes considered legitimate by all affected parties:

  • Provide a foundation of accepted scientific knowledge about the scope of the problems and the underlying biological-chemical-physical-socio-economic factors at work;
  • Develop rules to inform the planning process that are accepted as ‘‘right’’ and just by the stakeholders and provide for a process through which interested individuals (stakeholders)develop, debate, reject, and accept plans to deal withthe identified problems while promising to reach stipulated goals including a process for making the plan known to all affected parties;
  • Establish an accepted process for implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of the plan and its recommendations in an impartial way including a way to amend the plan or recommendation in light of new scientific information or changingsocial and/or environmental conditions.

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