This opinion piece situates the practice of an experimental module I taught as an academic -- Chester Retold: Unspoken Stories, Put into Words -- within some theories of 'community learning'. Community learning is understood here to articulate and enact a combination of concepts taken from critical pedagogy (Freire, 2018; hooks, 1994), experiential learning (Kolb, 2015; Gibbs, 1988) and learning development (Webster, 2017). It is also informed, like all teaching, by the author's own personal life and learning experiences within and without 'communities'. The practice of Chester Retold made a contribution to all these theoretical fields, but in particular perhaps a "conscious" intervention into critical pedagogy and an "unconscious" one into the third space (Whitchurch, 2013; Lisewski, 2021), beginning with learning development.