Considering Context and Home–School Relationships in a Head Start Classroom

• In Event: 52.040 - Reconsidering Context: An Examination of the Role of Context in Research and Practice in Early Childhood

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore how a Head Start teacher approaches her work with families by addressing the question: How are a teacher’s current contexts related to her understandings of home-school relationships? The paper examines the work of Samantha, a teacher who is enrolled in professional development that uses Moll, Gonzalez, Amanti, and Neff’s (1992) Funds of Knowledge approach as a framework for teaching asset-based orientations to family engagement.
In a time when “scaling-up” in education is increasingly valued, the idea that teachers enact practices dependent upon local contexts becomes lost. Instead emphasis is placed on good practices being uniformly applied across contexts (Erikson, 2014), which overlooks the importance of meaning being embedded in the particulars of socio-cultural-historical activities (Van Oers, 1998). Acknowledging context shows “a teacher does not teach children in general, but particular children in particular circumstances of learning and teaching in classrooms and in community life (Erikson, 2014, p. 3).” To focus on the specific circumstances of Samantha’s practice, I use Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) theory of identity, identity in practice, to examine how multiple contexts and experiences contributing to Samantha’s understandings of home-school relationships relates to how she works with families. The theory is used because it attends to relationships between the agency of an individual and her social, historical, and cultural contexts and experiences.
This is a single, instrumental case study exploring one teacher’s experiences with home-school relations. It is part a of a larger research project – a 5 year long, NSF-funded, qualitative research study of professional development on culturally and developmentally responsive pre-K mathematics. The participating teachers enrolled in 4 3-credit courses over a span of 2 years. Upon enrolling in the project Samantha agreed to be a part of a more in-depth case study in which I spent time learning about the nuances of her practices with families. Data were collected over a period of 16 months and analyzed using NVivo. Data include 4 semi-structured interviews (12 hours), assignments and audio-recordings from all professional development courses, participant observations from her classroom (11), home visits (5), and family events (4).
Samantha’s position as a Head Start teacher and her perceptions of the community she served created a context through which she took up the professional development and understood her relationships with families. Findings show that Head Starts’ expectations regarding family engagement practices led Samantha to see herself as a service provider who was responsible for both teaching and learning from families, creating a deep commitment to family engagement. However, these expectations combined with her perceptions of families who utilize Head Start constrained her ability to adopt an asset-focused approach.
The significance of this study lies in deepening understandings about the relationship between context and teachers’ work with families. Embracing the complexity of these relationships can help practitioners consider different perspectives and more inclusive ways to work with families and help policy-makers see that scaling-up is not a feasible way to approach improving the intricate and dynamic nature of education practices.

Author

• Kristin Lyn Whyte, Northwestern University