Creating Networked Learning Communities through UNESCO Aspnet

Waddington I¹*, Phillips S²* and Singh I³*

1. Education Queensland, Woombye, Queensland, Australia
2. Victoria Education Channel, Victoria, Australia
3. Burnside State High School, Nambour, Queensland, Australia

Community engagement and mobilisation requires infrastructure, leadership and support networks. In a modern, futures oriented community the driving coalition needs to provide people with a local identity within a national and global context. Any community transformation resulting in sustainable change requires a guiding coalition of dedicated and capable leaders. The other essential ingredient for community capacity building is education. In 2004 a small group of people from Victoria and Queensland decided to utilise the UNESCO Associated Schools project to plan the mobilisation of communities across Australia and the South Pacific to address community capacity building through this network of schools.

The project used a coalition of eleven schools to trial a community hub model that utilised the resources linked to schools to mobilise community education programs and activities. The aims were to:

• Contribute to the application of the UNESCO constitution.
• Mobilise schools with a view to undertaking & participating in pilot projects to strengthen the role of education in promoting a culture of peace & tolerance through community engagement.
• Develop networks for communities to exchange ideas, materials and resources.
• Develop in people a belonging to a global community and a relatedness to their peers in other towns, states and countries

This project is a fantastic model for individuals, groups and organizations to understand how exisiting networks, infrastructure and projects can be used to develop an integrated interagency approach to community engagement.

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