Toward a New Understanding of Community-Based Education: The Role of Community-Based Educational Spaces in Disrupting Inequality for Minoritized Youth

Abstract

Community-based educational spaces (CBES; afterschool programs, community-based youth organizations, etc.) have a long history of interrupting patterns of educational inequity and continue to do so under the current educational policy climate. The current climate of education, marked by neoliberal education restructuring, has left community-based educational spaces vulnerable in many of the same ways as public schools. Considering the current political moment of deep insecurity within public education, this review of research illuminates the role community-based educational spaces have played in resisting forms of educational inequality and their role in the lives of minoritized youth. With a review of seminal education research on community-based spaces, we intend to capture the ways these diverse out-of-school spaces inform the educational experiences, political identity development, and organizing and activist lives of minoritized youth. Further, this piece contends that reimagining education beyond the borders of the school is a form of resistance, as community-based leaders, youth workers, and youth themselves negotiate the dialectical nature of community-based educational spaces within a capitalist and racialized neoliberal state.