The Department of Family and Community Education is founded on the premise that education proceeds through many institutions- families, day care centers, churches and synagogues, libraries, museums clinics, business, prisons, and community agencies as well as schools, colleges, and universities - and that individuals learn from many significant others in their social networks- parents, siblings, grandparents, peers, clergy and other professionals as well as school teachers. The assumption is that those working in any particular educative institution need to understand the ways in which education proceeds in other educative institutions and settings as well as the processes of linkage and mediation among educative institutions. Thus, for example, those interested in familial education would be concerned not only with the ways a family's educational activities are organized in time and space, but also with the processes by which television and other forms of mass communication are mediated within the family. [more]
The Department of Family and Community Education had been a program within the Department of Home and Family Life (19??-1976) which it replaced. The program had been created in 196? under the inspiration of Lawrence Cremin. The first faculty was Professor Hope Leichter who joined the faculty in that department in 196?. Prof. Leichter chaired the department and worked at its transformation. Her two papers (1975, 1979) can be considered the founding documents explaining what the department was to be. The Department was closed in 1990.