Creating a Learning Environment

Continuous professional development is limited in the Community & Voluntary Sector. It is limited as organisations lack resources to pay for accredited courses or have the resources to allow staff to take the time to take courses. As a result, much of what staff or volunteers learn is internally resourced through informal peer-learning spaces. These are hugely important ways of learning- but like all informal spaces, we can ask questions of how successful they are

Are there ways to do things differently?

Do we have the skills to set up study groups/learning sets to discuss conflict (or indeed any other topic?). If the expertise is not there- we need to bring it in. We can approach other organisations who have experience in setting up learning sets or have community education skills to embed them in our organisations (for example, we can approach the Community Education Facilitators within the Local Education & Training Boards http://www.aontas.com/commed/cefs.html)

Peer learning spaces

Traveller organisations have used informal peer-learning spaces in the past. We can utilise those skills to learn from conflict. We can reflect on these spaces in the past:

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What will be the key factors based on previous experience for internal learning spaces to work?
• Who needs to drive it?
• How will it happen?
• How does your organisation create ways to generate new ideas and build collective responses to emerging issues?
• How are these new ideas communicated to the wider community- so that the learning goes from the organisation to the community?

Continuous Professional Development in Community Development Organisations

All practitioners of community development are engaged in informal learning, through peer spaces, reflection, new policy development etc. Given the lack of resources, the time/money to pay staff or volunteers for accredited courses is often limited, so the majority of learning comes from each other, and in most cases, is done internally in organisations and is peer resourced

Questions we need to ask ourselves are:

• How are we currently creating spaces for workers/volunteers to learn from each other?
• Is it structured?
• How are the topics for learning decided?
• How are they identified?
• What skills/knowledge & expertise do we currently have (a skills audit)?
• Are we really using the skills, knowledge and expertise that exist within our groups (locally, regionally, nationally)?
• Do we currently have the skills to set up learning groups within our organisation to tap into those skills to create learning groups?
• If we don’t, then how are we going to do this? Where is the expertise to work with us to develop policies to do this
• And when will this happen? (again, if these are not planned, they never will happen, and valuable learning will be lost)

If looking at peer learning spaces, we need to reflect on our current practice. If you have organised or been involved in a peer learning space within your project (or in another space), reflect on what that space looked like, operated etc.

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What will be the key factors for internal learning spaces working in your current organisation?- who needs to be there, where does it need to happen, how often etc
• Who needs to drive it?- who will be listened to!
• How will it happen?
• How does your organization currently create ways to generate new ideas & build collective responses to emerging issues?
• How is that then communicated to the wider community?
• These are aspects that will need to be considered if you are planning to use this website to create ways for the organisation to develop its thinking on conflict.