What is CEP?

The Community Education Programme (CEP) focuses on establishing a progressive model for a Community Education College. It sees the purpose of community education as supporting youth and adults to organise themselves to work and learn collectively, to provide mutual support and build unity, to claim their rights, and to develop their community and transform society.

It aims to broaden community participation in establishing more responsive community education linked to forms of socially useful work, livelihoods, and co-operatives.

What is Community Education?

Community Education emerges out of people’s experiences and social interests generated within communities. Community Education enables democratic agendas to emerge at local levels to challenge and eradicate oppression linked to exploitation, marginalisation, cultural dominance, powerlessness and violence. Community Education exists neither to help people enter into the workplace, nor to place profit as the main objective. Instead it focuses on education that benefits the whole of society, bringing about social transformation. 

Our approach to curriculum

We use Community Participatory Action Research (CPAR) as theory and practice to interrogate conditions for building community education programmes that encourage community change. CPAR assumes that those who have been systematically denied education or have been excluded, carry specific revealing wisdom about the history, structure, consequences and fracture points in unjust social arrangements. It sees all participants as knowers, learners, and researchers - all have the authority to interrogate and construct knowledge. It therefore embodies a democratic commitment to break the monopoly on who holds knowledge and for whom social research should be undertaken. CPAR deliberately inverts who frames research questions, designs methods, interpretation and products. It propels into prominence the role of the marginalised as architects of critical enquiry – the originators of knowledge for theory and collective action for social change.

Please read the CEP Manifesto:

You can also like our page on Facebook: NMMU Community Education Programme.