Building Capacity and Resiliency in Humanizing Work With Families

• In Event: Beyond the Engagement Paradigm: Family and Community Leadership in Co-Designing Educational Justice

Abstract

Recent trends among parents of color in the Los Angeles area indicate movement away from local public schools towards private, charter, and, particularly among African American families, home schooling options (Mazama & Lundy, 2015; Fields-Smith, C., 2015). Years of anger surrounding dehumanizing policies and practices (ie. zero-tolerance policies and random searches) have fueled the movement.
Although LA Unified School District has adopted positive discipline frameworks, investing in professional development and specialized personnel trained in restorative justice practices, most south LA families continue to feel frustrated with the lack of change. Community Asset Development Re-defining Education, or CADRE, has been working to disrupt the inequitable treatment of Black and Brown youth and families for many years (CADRE, 2017). Rather than lose hope, they continue to seek to change the system through parent power and family organizing for political action. Since working with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative, CADRE has begun to focus on moments of tension, flashpoints, to disrupt systemic oppression at the level of individual interaction with school-based educators. The design circle process has supported the evolving work towards creating humanizing relationships, specifically between school-based educators and families and communities.
Participants co-constructed design circles around a discourse of inquiry to create spaces to disrupt systemic oppression in real time. This study approached an understanding of discourse as systems of thought that construct the subjects and the worlds of which they speak (Foucault & Gordon, 1980). Through analysis of the data, it also became necessary to understand ways in which families and caregivers navigated these systems through strategies to manipulate power in relationships, and tactics as a calculation (de Certeau, 1980).

CADRE leadership and parent/family veteran core members (those having been core members for at least a few years) co-constructed the design circles included in this study. Each design circle was recorded and transcribed using an open coding, constant comparative method. Other data included semi-structured interviews with CADRE leadership team members.

Key findings evolved around four themes: reliving moments of tension, defensive orientations, shifts in perspectives on moments of tension, and shifts towards proactive-orientated engagement. Briefly, role-play activities emerging from design circles sometimes resulted in families reliving or re-enforcing deficit scripts (sometimes deficit framing of families, sometimes of teachers). Later design circles indicated a shift in thinking about these moments of tension/conflict towards the many moments, both problematic and full of possibility, that had occurred before. This led to new thinking around seasonal conversations, or ongoing conversations occurring at different times and for multiple purposes.

This study marks a shift in studying specific, context-based perspectives of family-school relationships through the ongoing work of an established family-based organization. The study uniquely focuses on solidarity between Black and Brown parents, intentionally taking a stand through centering the work in historical and contemporary experiences of Black families in the South LA area. This example of lateral solidarity is foundational to their work interrupting systemic oppression through everyday interactions between school-based educators and Black and Brown families.

Authors

• Lorena Guillén, University of California - Los Angeles

• Maisie Chin, Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE)