A Report to the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs by Southeast Minneapolis Council on Learning

This report describes work performed by the Southeast Minneapolis Council on Learning (SEMCOL) in the summer of 2008. Its purpose was to examine the idea that outside of schools there are numerous organizations providing learning opportunities, and that it might be useful to study them to discover how extensive these activities are, who has access to them, what the resource base is that supports the increasingly extensive learning taking place outside of schools and what can we do to improve this 'system.' During the course of this grant supported work we contacted more than 40 organizations and interviewed 50 people. We discovered it is not easy to answer fundamental questions about learning outside of schools. Most organizations offering learning either do not formally evaluate themselves, or use varied methods to do so. This makes it even harder to know exactly who the participants are in this 'system', who is paying for what, and how much learning is actually taking place. he other hand we found great enthusiasm for the project. Many people understood the value of trying to come to grips with non-school learning. Specifically, while we are not yet able to answer key underlying questions about the extent and impact of non-school learning, this report did lead to the creation of a new website that will be a one-stop site for all learning in Southeast Minneapolis. The existence of this site will make it possible to begin to gather information that can address key questions. Secondly, this report also led to the creation of another related project - the attempt to reach out to people (especially to those cut off from learning success in the current school system) using video stories of learning. These videos - as we have seen from the first few created - are capable of both inspiring and attracting people to wider community learning opportunities. Both of these positive steps are described in this report, and are the concrete ways that the work described in this report will be continued.Conducted on behalf of SEMCOL. Supported by Neighborhood Partnerships for Community Research (NPCR), a program of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), University of Minnesota