Relational Ethics and Community Education: Navigating Power, Reciprocity, and the Self‐in‐Relation

ABSTRACT

Drawing on thirty years of community‐based education practices, this chapter highlights the relational and participatory dimensions of engaging with learners in diverse settings as an antidote to an extractive era, where ethics emerges through practices of care, reciprocity, and accountability to learners and communities. Utilizing autoethnography to underscore the embodiment of relationality, the chapter examines challenges such as power, reciprocity, and the “self‐in‐relation”, across place, interest, and function‐based communities, emphasizing the importance of ongoing reflexivity and collaboration in sustaining equitable relationships. Using critical autoethnographic reflection across different types of communities, the chapter illustrates how relational ethics can guide ethical decision making in community education and concludes by offering six principles for relationally ethical practice.