Crossing Boundaries to Partner With Families: Supporting the Learning of Ambitious and Equitable Teaching

• In Event: Context-Specific Teaching Practice: Collaborating With Children's Families, Communities, and Community-Based Organizations to Support Equitable Teaching

Abstract

Objectives
Guided by the principle that families have unique and valuable knowledge about their children, we analyze teacher interns’ interactions in a set of three home visits with families of middle school students. We investigate to what extent interns develop competency in “partnering practices,” which we define as practices that bridge children’s academic experiences with those in their homes and communities. The home visits aim to support interns in learning to formulate questions that effectively elicit information about the experiences, knowledge, and home practices of families, especially as these relate to parents’ cultural and language backgrounds, as well as their aspirations for their children.

Theoretical framework
Teachers must learn to mitigate cultural conflicts and misconceptions between home and school, and to diminish the differences in educational outcomes that occur along the lines of race, class, gender, ethnicity and language (Griner and Stewart, 2012). Further, teachers must learn to draw on hybrid sources of knowledge about their students, including academic, practitioner and community-based knowledge as they work to construct curriculum and teach effectively (Zeichner, 2015). Given that personal connections with students and families have been shown to be critical for successful teaching (Epstein, 1998; Heath, 1983; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992), the home visits we have crafted provide interns with opportunities to learn how to develop these kinds of connections and ultimately envision and then enact ambitious instruction.

Methods and data
Through their coursework, 47 interns were coached to conduct and video record three semi-structured interviews with families of middle school students over the course of five months. Interns used a community cultural wealth model (Yosso, 2005) to analyze and document their reflections on their experiences. Our initial analyses focus on the video recordings of the home visits and accompanying transcripts. We employed constant comparative analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to develop a set of codes that identify specific partnering practices that interns used.

Results
Through video analysis, we learned that crossing boundaries into families’ homes offers teacher candidates opportunities to recognize, learn about and draw upon student and family-based assets. However, a key finding is that even with question protocols and multiple other instructional scaffolds, the quality of enactment differed in significant ways. Variable enactments of partnering practices resulted in variably generative interactions with parents, producing deeper learning opportunities for interns who enacted collaborative partnering practices that built on families’ assets.

Scientific or Scholarly significance of the work
This study describes a TE field-based component that aims to develop a better understanding of how teacher educators can help beginning teachers learn to partner with families. By articulating specific dimensions of these practices, our group has begun building an infrastructure for guiding interns in the study and enactment of these practices. This infrastructure represents significant progress towards developing teacher education pedagogies that support the uptake of culturally responsive teaching in practice-focused ways.
 

Authors

• Simona Goldin, University of Michigan

• Debi Khasnabis, University of Michigan

• Catherine H. Reischl, University of Michigan

• Susan Atkins, Ann Arbor Public Schools