Moving Toward Collaboration: Theory and Practice of Parent Engagement in a Collective Impact Initiative

• In Event: Bridging the Engagement Gap: Lessons for Equitable School-Community-Family Collaboration Within a Collective Impact Initiative

Abstract

Meaningful parent-family-school relations are critical to improving the success of struggling students (Bryk et al., 2010; Henderson & Mapp, 2002), but the application of traditional involvement approaches within the context of highly asymmetrical power dynamics, and cultural, class, and language divides has tended to reinforce deficit orientations of educators and limit the authentic participation of the parents and families with the most at stake in struggling schools (Auerbach, 2012; Olivos, 2006). The purpose of this paper is 1) to articulate an emerging conceptual framework for equitable collaboration between parents, families, communities, and educators and 2) to contextualize theory with insights from on-the-ground practice in building parent engagement within a collective impact initiative.

First, we briefly discuss how the role of parents in education has evolved in the literature, from traditional parent involvement (a deficit-based approach that privileges normative school-centric behaviors) to engagement (efforts to integrate non-dominant parents into existing structures), and then suggest a third model of equitable collaboration. We describe how equitable collaborations focus on systemic change, non-dominant parent capacity and power, and educational change connected to social change efforts in the broader community.

We then explore how this framework might be used as a lens to understand efforts to build family participation in schools within the context of a collective impact initiative, a cross-sector organizational alignment effort focused on a common agenda, in this case, of addressing the problem of educational disparities (Kania & Kramer, 2011). We discuss the specific affordances and constraints of this collective impact work as a new and critical context within which parent engagement efforts are unfolding and highlight implications of these efforts for theory and practice in family engagement, particularly within highly diverse, low-income communities.

Authors

• Ann M. Ishimaru, University of Washington

• Joe L. Lott, University of Washington