About Hofstra
Hofstra University is a dynamic private college on Long Island, NY, where students can choose from more than 140 undergraduate and 150 graduate programs in liberal arts and sciences, business, communication, education, health and human services, and honors studies, as well as a School of Law and School of Medicine. | more |
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Mission Statement
The Department of Foundations, Leadership and Policy Studies (FLPS) is committed to preparing reflective leaders for complex educational organizations in diverse, multicultural environments. Our programs are structured upon a base of knowledge, informed by a set of beliefs, assumptions and values, and committed to the goals of teaching skills and developing tools for reflective practice. Programs in Educational Administration are designed to develop educational leaders and change agents who will accept roles as reflective and effective scholar-practitioners. Through professional education courses, field-based experience, cooperative learning opportunities, and extensive work in the process of reflection, students will learn to articulate their own visions of education and to carry out their own informed and purposeful practice. Programs in Foundations of Education are designed to provide understanding of philosophical, historical, and social foundations of education, and draw from diverse disciplines including philosophy, history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science and economics. The programs in Foundations are designed to accommodate students with a variety of backgrounds and interests.
The FLPS faculty are committed to creating a different kind of educator: women and men who will lead their educational communities as humane and ethical social critics. In embracing a broader concept of leadership preparation than simply the training of practitioners, FLPS programs provide the intellectual foundation, opportunity for reflection through both cognitive and aesthetic experience, and an experiential approach. This combination, we believe, is necessary to prepare creative, flexible, visionary leaders with the skills necessary to conceptualize and analyze, appreciate and construct, interpret and integrate knowledge for the purpose of social transformation.
Consonant with the mission of the School of Education and Health Human Services, we seek to develop a learning bond between ourselves and students. We deliberately present the diversity of beliefs and epistemologies embedded in the different disciplines that inform FLPS programs, while nurturing the collaboration that unites the individual academic practices of our faculty. Our collective program vision - the preparation of educators for leadership roles as scholar-practitioners - is enriched by the diverse perspectives of individual faculty, committed to the collaborative task of guiding students in the process of articulating their own individual visions.
The philosophical foundation of FLPS emphasizes the transformative possibilities of educational leadership. We expect our graduates to have developed educational convictions informed by a broad vision of American education in both local and global communities. We expect them to have developed habits of critical questioning and the reflective means for evaluating their own performance. This includes the ability to examine educational issues contextually through multiple perspectives; to manipulate organizational structures for the purpose of improving education; and to practice deliberate, informed leadership.