What is JCC’s Purpose?

To be a safe and creative learning community where young people from diverse backgrounds can take up their human right to a 21st Century education. At JCC we believe that a quality education nurtures lifelong learning. Our learners practice and improve their lifelong learning skills so they can build meaningful lives for themselves and others.

JCC strives for this outcome by building a safe community where diversity is respected and appreciated. Our learning is driven by curiosity, expanded through reflection, and maintained through perseverance. We believe that powerful, transferable learning happens, when learners are enabled to explore their passions and interests with others, and develop their personal agency.

This is our purpose.

How does JCC work to achieve this?

  • Through our everyday practice in which we ask ourselves: how can this moment provide opportunities for a young person to strengthen personal agency, work towards mastery and foster meaning and connection. What Lifelong Learning opportunities could this moment present?
  • Through our four pillars of practice:
    • Poststructural Human Service Practice
    • Student Centred Learning Practice
    • Community Development
    • Transdisciplinary Practice
  • And by working everyday to live out our five core values of: Relationships, Reflection, Respect, Responsibility, Rights.

Our Four Pillars of Practice

Poststructuralism embraces the following ideas and ways of working:

  • Everyone has the right to have their skills and knowledges of survival respected, honoured and acknowledged. Our role is to help shine the light on young people’s responses to difficult situations.
  • People are the expert in their own lives given they know all of the options available to them.
  • The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem. People are not “damaged”.
  • Our role is to support young people as they construct their preferred identity stories and to enable them to take as much responsibility for change as possible.
  • Language is powerful. The language we use influences every interaction. Identity is socially constructed and the language we use influences people’s identity conclusion.

Student Centred Learning Practice

At JCC, we with some of the following ideas that can be characterised as Student Centred Learning Practices:

  • >All learners are inherently curious. Safe spaces are needed for learners to express their curiosities to others.
  • >All learners have the potential to design their own learning experiences – the role of a learning facilitator is to support learners to build this capacity within themselves.
  • Lifelong learning skills can help us to be learners that ask good questions and use a range strategies to seek answers.
  • Quality learning experiences start with the questions of learners. Established or accredited curricula provide useful touchstones through which some learners questions can be answered, but does not need to be the starting point for all meaningful and useful learning experiences.
  • Some of our deepest and most transferable learning experiences occur when our reasons for learning are personal and purposeful. Supporting a learner to find a passion or purpose that is meaningful to them is a valuable and meaningful part of the learning process.

Community Development Practice

Community Development Practice at JCC embraces these ideas:

  • Communities are places to learn and a thing to learn about.
  • We are an intentional community where we can all learn about and from the multi-dimensions of community life.
  • We can learn how to shape and influence this community and other communities.
  • Our community creates an opportunity to learn about acceptance, diversity, belonging and the importance of celebrating these dimensions.
  • Participation in community can be a catalyst for personal and social change.

Transdisciplinary Practice

    • The work is complex, multidimensional and requires constant creative processes developed through collaboration and multiple perspectives.
    • We bring our whole selves to the work, we are more than the professionals we represent.
    • Our whole selves influence our work, we examine and bring our cultures, lives experiences and identities to our practice.
    • We share our ideas and knowledge and we are open to learn from each other.

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  • We can never know the best way to respond to every situation. Our best chance is sharing what we all have and working together to find ways forward.