Introduction and Core Ideas
Community Engaged Parent Education is comprehensive parent education that attends to both the person and public dimensions of parenting. Public dimensions of parenting include neighborhood, community, cultural, historical, religious, economic, political, legal, institutional, and environmental factors.
Mission: To develop the capacity of parents for citizen deliberation and civic action on public issues related to children’s well-being.
Vision: ECFE can be a “public space” for civic conversations that help to revive our democracy.
Core Ideas:
- There are identifiable skills for weaving public issues into everyday parent education. This process entails pulling the threads one at a time, class after class, and requires preparation by the parent educator to elicit public themes in the regular curriculum.
- Parents are eager to engage with public issues when these issues are clearly related to their concerns for their children.
- Civic action by parents sometimes arises from these conversations about public issues. Action can “bubble up” from citizen dialogue, but should not be expected from every conversation or on every issue.
- Citizen action occurs on a continuum that includes gathering information, talking to other parents, acting individually, and collective public action.
- This more expansive role as a citizen professional working with citizen parents can enhance the professional and personal satisfaction of parent educators.
- This role requires self-preparation to build one’s knowledge and resource base on public issues affecting children and parenting.
- It takes a year of mentoring to learn this approach, along with exposure to the theory behind it. It takes two years to achieve mastery.