Beyond Classrooms: Community-Based Learning for Personal, Social, and Vocational Empowerment

Definition of Community-Based Learning (CBL)

Community-Based Learning (CBL) is defined as an educational approach that takes place with and within communities, grounded in participation, collaboration, communication, and contextual relevance (Andrade et al., 2022; Brown, 2024). Unlike formal education, which often relies on standardized curricula, CBL leverages local resources, networks, and cultural practices to create inclusive, adaptive learning opportunities. Recent studies view CBL not merely as an alternative to schooling but as a complementary ecosystem that supports lifelong and situated learning (Zamiri & Esmaeili, 2024).

Personal, social, and vocational skills: Conceptual importance

Community-Based Learning (CBL) has consistently been associated with the development of personal skills, including confidence, self-efficacy, responsibility, and discipline. These competencies play a central role in fostering resilience and self-regulated learning, enabling students to manage their own learning processes, adapt to challenges, and ultimately achieve both academic and professional success (Deed, 2010; Raath & Hay, 2016; Stapleton, 2025).

Equally important are the social skills cultivated through CBL, such as teamwork, cooperation, civic engagement, and leadership. These capacities contribute to building trust and strengthening social cohesion within communities. They also align with Wenger’s concept of communities of practice, which emphasizes that learning emerges through participation in collective practices and the development of shared identities (Wenger, 2009).

In addition, CBL fosters vocational skills that are directly linked to employability and sustainable livelihoods. These include technical competencies, entrepreneurial abilities, and financial literacy, all of which prepare learners to respond effectively to industry demands. By emphasizing applied skills over abstract theoretical knowledge, CBL proves especially valuable in technical and vocational contexts, bridging the gap between students’ training and labor market expectations (Boahin & Hofman, 2014; Zakaria et al., 2018).

Although personal, social, and vocational skills are interdependent where growth in one area often reinforces development in another research tends to examine them in isolation. For instance, vocational projects may neglect the cultivation of social skills, while civic initiatives rarely assess vocational outcomes. This fragmentation limits the development of integrative frameworks capable of capturing the holistic empowerment potential of CBL.

Theoretical foundations

Community-Based Learning (CBL) is grounded in multiple theoretical traditions across education, sociology, and development. Freire’s critical pedagogy emphasizes education as a practice of liberation through dialogue and critical reflection (Freire, 2000). Sen’s capability approach frames empowerment as the expansion of freedoms and opportunities to achieve valued life outcomes (Sen, 1999). Wenger’s communities of practice highlights learning as social participation that builds identity and collective knowledge (Wenger, 1998). Meanwhile, Knowles’ concept of andragogy underscores that adult learners require autonomy, relevance, and experiential application (Knowles, 1980).

Table 1 summarizes the main theoretical perspectives that inform CBL, their implications for practice, and the gaps in their operationalization.

Previous findings across contexts

E Evidence from diverse regions illustrates the versatility of Community-Based Learning (CBL). In Asia, community learning centers (CLCs) have been central in promoting vocational training and improving rural livelihoods. For instance, Belete (2022) documents how CLCs provide literacy, technical training, and vocational skills that directly support community development, while Bun, Ueangchokchai, and Nopas (2025) show how Cambodian CLCs sustained vocational education during the COVID-19 crisis, thereby linking CBL to resilience in times of disruption.

In Africa, CBL has often been embedded in women’s cooperatives that foster solidarity and entrepreneurship. Raniga (2021) highlights how sewing cooperatives in South Africa significantly improved women’s income and social standing, while Arthur-Holmes (2024) conceptualizes collective action in informal cooperatives in the mining sector as a form of community empowerment. Complementing these findings, a UN Women (2023) initiative in Ethiopia demonstrated how revolving funds combined with basic business and life skills training transformed women’s livelihoods, underscoring the potential of CBL to address gendered dimensions of poverty.

In Western contexts, CBL has been applied to advance lifelong learning, civic participation, and sustainability goals. Lake (2021), for example, assessed the long-term impact of CBL on undergraduate students and found evidence of sustained development across civic, personal, and professional domains. These findings indicate that, beyond immediate skill gains, CBL can generate enduring outcomes aligned with broader social agendas in developed societies.

Recent systematic reviews reinforce these regional insights. Zamiri and Esmaeili (2024) identified digital platforms and collaborative projects as effective mechanisms for strengthening personal and social skills. Harmsel-Nieuwenhuis et al.(2025) demonstrated how life skills acquired in community contexts could transfer into vocational capacities among vulnerable youth. Similarly, Kizys et al. (2025) showed that place-based CBL in rural STEM education improved both career readiness and social engagement, emphasizing its adaptability to disciplinary and geographical variations.

Despite these advances, three persistent weaknesses limit the generalizability of findings. First, measurement inconsistency remains a challenge, as indicators vary widely from attendance rates to employment outcomes, hindering comparability across studies. Second, much of the research adopts a short-term focus, with limited longitudinal or quasi-experimental designs capable of capturing the durability of CBL’s impacts. Third, contextual mediators such as cultural norms, governance structures, and digital infrastructures are acknowledged but rarely examined systematically, despite their potential to shape program outcomes significantly.

Identified gaps and multidisciplinary insights

Synthesizing the literature across disciplines reveals several enduring limitations that constrain a comprehensive understanding of Community-Based Learning (CBL). First, there is an integration gap, as few studies propose holistic frameworks that explicitly link personal, social, and vocational outcomes. Many studies concentrate on certain outcomes without incorporating them into a holistic paradigm (Alsbury et al., 2020; Rojo, 2025). Second, a measurement gap persists, with an absence of validated, theory-driven indicators capable of capturing empowerment across domains. Validated, theory-driven measures that adequately capture empowerment are lacking. Current research underscores the necessity for defined metrics to accurately assess empowerment (Lauzier et al., 2014; Meyerson et al., 2024). Third, a causality gap is evident, since most studies rely on cross-sectional designs, offering limited longitudinal evidence and weak causal inference. These designs, although common, provide insufficient longitudinal evidence and weak causal inference, hence limiting the capacity to derive robust findings regarding the long-term effects and causal linkages within CBL contexts (Shahar & Shahar, 2013; Spector, 2019). Fourth, an equity gap emerges, given the insufficient disaggregation of findings by gender, age, disability, or socioeconomic status. To rectify the equity gap, it is essential to disaggregate data by diverse demographic characteristics. This methodology can uncover concealed tendencies and guide focused initiatives to assist underprivileged populations (Ponce et al., 2025; Victora et al., 2019). Finally, a sustainability gap remains, as little research addresses how policy, governance, and market linkages sustain CBL outcomes at scale.

A multidisciplinary perspective deepens these critiques. From the lens of education sciences, research emphasizes the role of pedagogy and scaffolding but rarely situates them in broader social and economic structures. Scaffolding is an extensively studied educational strategy that offers provisional assistance to students. It is based on constructivist theories and seeks to improve learning by rendering thought visible and facilitating knowledge building (Mathé & Christensen, 2024). Sociology and anthropology highlight how trust, norms, and cultural authority mediate learning processes, yet these insights are seldom operationalized in program evaluation. In an Australian university, trust is established through dialogue and familiarity between academics and students, hence enhancing the reliability of assessments and facilitating learning (McLean, 2018). Economics and development studies foreground employability and cost-effectiveness, while public health research links CBL to health literacy and collective action. Meanwhile, ICT4D scholarship draws attention to both the promise and pitfalls of digital mediation in extending access to CBL. Finally, governance studies underscore the critical importance of enabling policies and institutional frameworks in scaling community-based initiatives.

Taken together, these insights suggest that CBL should be understood not merely as a pedagogical method but as a systems intervention, requiring the co-evolution of pedagogy, social capital, market linkages, technology, and governance. Yet, the current literature tends to privilege single dimensions, producing fragmented insights and outcomes that are often short-lived.

Research design and protocol

This study employed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) design, guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA 2020) framework. Adhering to PRISMA 2020 enhances the transparency of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, facilitating readers’ evaluation of the credibility and relevance of the results (Page et al., 2021). The review protocol was established prior to the commencement of data collection and specified the research questions, eligibility criteria, search strategy, screening procedures, and synthesis methods. To enhance transparency and replicability, the study followed open-science best practices, and all related materials were deposited in Zenodo. This is essential in disciplines such as psychology and education, where compliance with standards like PRISMA and FAIR is stressed to improve reproducibility and data reutilization (Burgard et al., 2025).

Eligibility criteria

Eligibility criteria are established benchmarks utilized to ascertain which papers qualify for inclusion in a systematic review. These criteria are crucial for guaranteeing that the review is thorough and impartial (Muñoz-Urtubia et al., 2023; Nagendrababu et al., 2023). The eligibility criteria were defined to ensure that only studies directly relevant to the effectiveness of community-based learning (CBL) were included. Studies were considered eligible if they were published in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, or conference proceedings between 2010 and 2025, explicitly addressed CBL, learning communities, or community education, and reported measurable outcomes related to personal, social, or vocational skills. Empirical research employing quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods designs, as well as systematic or scoping reviews with explicit methodologies, was included.

Conversely, studies were excluded if they were non-empirical in nature, such as opinion pieces, commentaries, or editorials. Publications that lacked measurable outcomes within the three domains of interest were also excluded, as were studies limited to formal schooling contexts without a demonstrable community-based component. These criteria ensured that the final body of literature represented methodologically robust and contextually relevant evidence for assessing CBL effectiveness.

Information sources and search strategy

A comprehensive search was conducted across five major academic databases Scopus, Pubmed, Crossref, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar selected for their broad coverage of education, social sciences, and development studies. Boolean operators and keyword combinations were applied to maximize retrieval. A representative search string was formulated as follows:

The search was restricted to English-language, peer-reviewed publications published between 2010 and 2025. Additionally, the reference lists of included articles were manually screened to identify further relevant studies not captured in the initial search.

Selection process

The selection process was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, titles and abstracts were screened to remove duplicates and exclude irrelevant studies. In the second stage, full texts were reviewed to assess compliance with the eligibility criteria. It guarantees that the review is thorough, transparent, and methodologically rigorous, hence enhancing the quality of evidence synthesis (Davis et al., 2021; Knobloch et al., 2011).

Data extraction and quality appraisal

For each eligible study, data were systematically extracted on author, year of publication, country, research context, study design, outcomes assessed, and indicators used to measure effectiveness. The methodological quality of included studies was evaluated using the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal Checklists and the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) tools, tailored to study design. Employing both JBI and CASP instruments guarantees a thorough assessment of methodological quality. The JBI tools are very beneficial for qualitative research and systematic reviews, whilst CASP tools are proficient for the swift appraisal of Level I evidence, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses (Chang et al., 2022; Salins et al., 2024). This dual approach ensured both internal validity and consistency across diverse methodologies.

Synthesis

The extracted data were analyzed using thematic synthesis, enabling the organization of findings into categories such as indicators of effectiveness, personal outcomes, social outcomes, vocational outcomes, and contextual factors. A narrative synthesis approach was adopted to compare patterns and divergences across studies, while highlighting consistencies and contradictions in the evidence base. Narrative synthesis is an effective method for integrating varied and intricate material, providing comprehensive contextual insights and an enhanced comprehension of research outcomes. Nonetheless, it necessitates meticulous implementation of structured frameworks to guarantee transparency and rigor (Madden et al., 2018, 2019).

Ethical considerations

As this research was based solely on secondary data from published sources, no primary data collection was undertaken, and therefore, ethical approval was not required. Nevertheless, the review adhered to established guidelines for transparency, rigor, and research integrity.

Study selection

The PRISMA 2020 flow diagram ( Figure 1) summarizes the selection process. Across four databases (Scopus, PubMed, Crossref, and Google Scholar), we identified 8,395 records. After removing 335 duplicates, 8,060 unique records remained for title-and-abstract screening. We sought retrieval for 3,447 reports and successfully retrieved 1,618 full texts (1,829 were not retrieved). Following full-text assessment, 1,496 reports were excluded (predominantly for lacking an explicit community-based component), leaving 122 studies for inclusion in the synthesis (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. PRISMA 2020 flow diagram—Community-based learning: personal, social, and vocational outcomes (2010–2025).

Characteristics of included studies

The 122 included studies span multiple regions and CBL modalities (e.g., community learning centres/PKBM, women’s cooperatives, peer-mentoring networks, service-learning, place-based STEM). Designs range from qualitative case studies and mixed-methods evaluations to quasi-experimental and longitudinal cohorts. Outcomes cluster around personal (e.g., self-efficacy, agency, self-regulation), social (e.g., teamwork, leadership, civic engagement, trust), and vocational domains (e.g., employability, entrepreneurship, financial literacy). Table 2 summarizes study descriptors.

Thematic findings

Indicators of effectiveness

Operationalizations of CBL effectiveness commonly included participation/engagement, collaboration/communication, and contextual relevance, alongside learner-centred constructs (e.g., self-efficacy, motivation) and labour-market-proximal outcomes (technical competence, entrepreneurial activity, employability). This diversity demonstrates CBL’s versatility but complicates cross-study comparability, motivating a unified indicator set and standardized reporting.

Personal outcomes

Across youth and adult populations, CBL is consistently associated with gains in self-confidence, agency, self-regulation, discipline, and responsibility. Authentic, community-situated tasks appear to foster stronger ownership and resilience than classroom-only comparators. Where longitudinal data exist, improvements tend to persist, though durability beyond program cycles remains under-tested.

Social outcomes

The participatory nature of CBL strengthens teamwork, leadership, trust, civic engagement, and social cohesion, frequently via Communities-of-Practice dynamics (participation → identity → social capital). Students gain leadership and project management skills, as well as cooperative and conflict resolution skills, from this cooperative method (DelSesto et al., 2025; Stevahn et al., 2016). Several contexts show spillovers from individual growth to collective efficacy and solidarity, particularly in cooperatives and community learning centres.

Vocational outcomes

Evidence for employability, entrepreneurship, and financial capabilities is positive but context dependent. Effects are strongest where programs embed market linkages, mentoring, and work based projects; conversely, short cycles and weak employer engagement attenuate impacts. Few studies track long-term placement, income, or enterprise survival, limiting conclusions about durability. Studies on long-term foster care placements reveal favorable results in familial and social interactions, as well as pro-social behaviors throughout time, notwithstanding apprehensions over placement stability and academic performance (Fernandez, 2009).

Supporting and hindering factors

Effectiveness is enabled by co-design with communities, facilitator competence, cultural fit, partnerships (industry/NGO), supportive policy, and adequate infrastructure (including digital). Barriers include fragmented indicators, short-term funding, uneven governance/monitoring, digital divides, and gaps in equity reporting. Overall, CBL functions as a system intervention whose success depends on pedagogy and the surrounding ecosystem. This encompasses active learning methodologies, competency-based evaluations, educator training, technological incorporation, and institutional backing. Tackling these components can facilitate the resolution of difficulties and guarantee that CBL adequately equips students for practical applications (Fernandez, 2009; Ford, 2024).

Synthesis

Using a structured narrative approach, we grouped outcomes by personal, social, and vocational domains and standardized direction-of-effect (benefit /no clear effect/harm). Patterns favour CBL for personal and social outcomes, with positive but more variable signals for vocational outcomes. We interpret these patterns cautiously, noting heterogeneity in measures and designs and the constraints of direction-based synthesis. An equity lens suggests disproportionate benefits for women, rural learners, and low-SES groups in programs with inclusive design and economic linkages.

Interpretation of research questions

The synthesis indicates that Community-Based Learning (CBL) reliably improves personal and social outcomes, while vocational outcomes are positive yet more contingent on context. Authentic, community situated tasks appear to cultivate self confidence, agency, self regulation, and a stronger sense of responsibility capacities that sustain learning beyond classrooms. Socially, participation and collaboration foster teamwork, leadership, trust, cohesion, and civic engagement; individual gains frequently reverberate into collective efficacy. Team collaboration enables members to exchange skills, talents, and ideas, resulting in enhanced efficiency, innovation, and strengthened interpersonal ties (Geada, 2023; Weil et al., 2017). Vocational effects employability, technical competence, financial capability, and entrepreneurial orientation strengthen when programs are anchored to market pathways (mentoring, internships, enterprise incubation) and weaken under short cycles or minimal employer engagement. Across studies, indicators used to assess effectiveness are diverse and unevenly specified, underscoring the need for a core indicator set that enables comparability.

Key success factors

CBL succeeds when several conditions co-occur. Co-design with communities secures relevance and ownership. Co-design guarantees that initiatives are directly pertinent to the community’s requirements, hence enhancing their efficacy and sustainability (Lam et al., 2017; Murdock et al., 2023). Facilitator capability especially dialogic pedagogy, individualized coaching, and boundary spanning between education providers, communities, and employers acts as a principal lever. Cultural and linguistic fit builds trust; stable governance and financing prevent program drift; and cross-sector partnerships (including industry and NGOs) translate learning into opportunities. Digital mediation can widen access and scaffold reflection, provided inclusion safeguards address connectivity and device gaps. Above all, disciplined measurement minimum outcomes per domain and routine equity disaggregation enables programs to learn and improve.

Theoretical integration

Findings support a capability in practice account of CBL. Dialogue and participation enlarge agency; expanding agency, in turn, enables deeper participation creating a reinforcing loop. The interaction between dialogue and agency is apparent in organizational contexts when genuine leadership cultivates a dialogue-centric culture, hence enhancing learning and agency across various levels within the organization (Mazutis & Slawinski, 2008). As participants enter shared practices, identities and social capital form, which opens vocational opportunities. Adult-learning conditions (autonomy, relevance, application) furnish the pedagogical substrate across age groups. CBL therefore functions less as a classroom method and more as a systems intervention: pedagogical mechanisms (participation, collaboration, relevance) operate through institutional and structural mediators (culture, facilitator quality, digital infrastructure, governance, market linkages) to generate mutually reinforcing personal, social, and vocational outcomes that endure when sustainment provisions are in place.

Novelty of the study

This review contributes by (i) integrating personal, social, and vocational outcomes within a single analytic lens; (ii) proposing an indicator–instrument map that improves cross-study comparability; (iii) applying an explicit equity lens to examine who benefits most; and (iv) operationalizing a transparent, appraisal-aware synthesis approach that remains informative amid heterogeneity.

Practical implications

Programs should begin with aset based co-design and task authenticity that ties competencies to real problems. Facilitator development must be planned upfront covering dialogic methods, mentoring, project design, and partnership orchestration. Facilitators must be processually adaptive, balancing support and challenge to sustain a dialogic environment marked by inquiry and exploration (Alrø & Billund, 2021). To maximize vocational effects, learning should be coupled with market pathways (structured internships, micro-enterprise support, employer co-mentoring). Institutionalization through community learning centers or comparable structures requires financing envelopes, light touch accreditation, and data systems capable of tracking medium-term outcomes. Finally, equity by design should be embedded: flexible schedules, transport/childcare supports, accessibility features, and safe participation channels for underserved groups.

Theoretical implications

The results clarify why vocational outcomes often materialize after gains in personal and social domains: employability and entrepreneurship are more likely when agency, practice based identity, and social capital have first taken root. The proposed framework enables multilevel theory testing micro (facilitator–learner interactions), meso (community networks and institutions), and macro (policy, markets, digital infrastructures) and yields testable propositions (e.g., participation → agency → social capital → employability), moderated by market linkages and governance quality.

Limitations

Heterogeneity of designs, populations, and measures constrained meta-analysis and necessitated direction of effect synthesis. Indicator variability and inconsistent equity reporting reduce comparability and risk obscuring distributional effects. Many studies adopt short time horizons; evidence on durability job placement, income stability, or enterprise survival remains limited. A separate study examined the influence of supervised work placements on career outcomes, concluding that these placements typically yield a favorable impact on employment, facilitating quicker job acquisition for graduates and improving their self-efficacy, knowledge, abilities, and attitudes (Inceoglu et al., 2019). Language scope and time window may omit relevant local evidence. In several instances, eligibility decisions depended on available links or metadata, which can undercount community components not visible in titles or abstracts.

Directions for future research

Future work should (1) standardize outcomes via a core indicator set for each domain with validated instruments and mandatory equity disaggregation; (2) strengthen causal inference through longitudinal and quasi experimental designs, realist evaluation, and process tracing; (3) track durability over 12–36 months for placement, income, and enterprise outcomes; (4) interrogate digital mediation to identify blends that expand access without deepening divides; (5) model ecosystem interactions among governance, financing, and market linkages, including cost effectiveness; (6) compare modalities (service-learning, community learning centers, cooperative-based, place-based STEM) to identify threshold conditions in low-resource and rural settings; and (7) improve reporting quality (registered protocols, shareable extraction sheets, subgroup reporting) to enable higher-precision quantitative synthesis.

Summary

This review shows that Community-Based Learning (CBL) functions as a multidomain empowerment strategy. Evidence converges on consistently positive effects for personal and social outcomes such as self-confidence, agency, self-regulation, teamwork, leadership, trust, and civic engagement while vocational impacts are positive yet more contingent on context. Vocational gains strengthen when programs embed market linkages, mentoring, and authentic work-based projects; they weaken under short cycles or minimal employer engagement. Heterogeneity in study designs and outcome measures limited meta-analysis and accentuated the need for standardized indicators and equity-aware reporting. Taken together, the findings support reading CBL not merely as a pedagogical technique but as a systems intervention whose effectiveness depends on the alignment of pedagogy with culture, governance, digital infrastructure, and labor-market connections. The cultural fit of CBL and the backing of governing bodies are essential to its success. For example, in order to improve student abilities, the application of CBL in nursing education in Cambodia necessitated cultural adaptation and assistance from educational institutions and clinical preceptors (Koto-Shimada et al., 2023).

Contributions

This study advances the field in four ways. First, it integrates personal, social, and vocational outcomes within a single analytic lens, countering the fragmentation that dominates prior work. Second, it proposes a unified indikator instrument map that clarifies what to measure and how, thereby improving comparability across settings. Third, it brings an explicit equity lens to bear on CBL, highlighting who benefits most and where reporting gaps persist. Fourth, it demonstrates a transparent, appraisal-aware synthesis approach including direction of effect visualization that yields decision-relevant insights despite heterogeneity, and that can be replicated or extended in future evidence reviews.

Recommendations

To translate these insights into action, programs should co-design with communities, ensure facilitator capability in dialogic and partnership oriented practice, and hard-wire market pathways (structured internships, employer co-mentoring, micro-enterprise incubation) into the learning architecture. Institutions and policymakers should institutionalize CBL through stable financing, light touch accreditation, and interoperable data systems capable of tracking medium-term outcomes and equity subgroups. Researchers and evaluators should adopt a core indicator set for personal, social, and vocational domains, use validated instruments, register protocols, and prioritize longitudinal and quasi-experimental designs that test mechanisms and durability over 12–36 months. By aligning pedagogy with ecosystem supports and by standardizing how outcomes are measured and reported, the field can move from promising projects to scalable, equitable, and sustained community-based learning systems. Community-based learning is acknowledged as an effective pedagogical approach that promotes the common good and improves educational environments by merging classroom instruction with community service and action (Nesmith et al., 2020; Zlotkowski & Duffy, 2010).