Liberation and Discourse in Community Learning and Development: an Application of Liberational and Discourse Theory to Community Capacity Building Through Non-formal Learning in Rural Scotland 1st edition

Education, formal or non-formal, is either a mechanism for change or conservation: it is transformational or transmissive. This book interrogates the philosophies that underpin the notion of a dominant discourse and its relationshp to social change. These are then applied to the concept of community asset development through the CADISPA Project in rural Scotland. The book identifies the tension that exists between two fundamentally different positions on the notion of citizen engagement and personal and social change, that of Paulo Freire and Michael Foucault, and compares and contrasts the implications of each in a real-time community development project. Understanding the impact of this differental is important to those professionals and community activists who would wish to secure their interventions in local communities on the basis of reflective and theory driven practice.