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.

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Ambrose, N. E., Fitch, L., & Bateman, N. G. (2006) Finding 3

When working on riparian issues, employ multiple interactions and a mix of many extension methods to offer opportunities for diverse information and ideas and methods of providing them, and to meet individualized learning needs. Methods may include presentations, field days, workshops, individual landowner visits, riparian health inventories and reports, written materials, technical advice, and web site information on riparian areas and grazing management. Continue reading →

Bidwell, R. D., & Ryan, C. M. (2006) Finding 1

To assure that watershed groups can play a valuable substantive role in states’ watershed management programs, encourage and maintain heterogeneous participation in watershed partnerships as they work through assessment, planning or day-to-day operations of the partnership, wrestle with internal differences, and establish new collective goals and strategies to achieve them. Continue reading →

Bidwell, R. D., & Ryan, C. M. (2006) Finding 2

To assure that watershed groups can play a valuable substantive role in states’ watershed management programs, encourage active recruiting to include a variety of perspectives. As collaborative policies are developed, sponsors must strike a balance to achieve an appropriate balance of participants to address each concern. Continue reading →

Bidwell, R. D., & Ryan, C. M. (2006) Finding 3

Explicitly recognize the implications of organizational affiliation when designingpolicies that foster collaboration in watersheds. Organizational culture and preexisting constituent relationships may dictate definitions of the problem and the range of preferred alternatives in agency-affiliated partnerships. Continue reading →