The 2019 Dual-Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnership (Version 2): Doubling Down on Culturally Sustaining and Equitable Practice

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Toward a Culturally Sustaining Model of Family and Community Engagement in Schools

Abstract

This presentation explores the way research, translated to policy guidelines, shapes the work of practitioners working in family and community engagement. In support of the conference call to reinforce connections between researchers and organizational stakeholders, this presentation interrogates the ways community feedback shapes the revision and evolution of frameworks that guide policy and practice.

The original Dual Capacity Building Framework (DCBF) for Family-School Partnerships received its official launch in April 2014 at the first annual IEL Family and Community Engagement Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. The DCBF was authored with the help and support of the US Department of Education (USDOE) during the my consultancy with the department. The publication was released in 2013 by the Southwest Educational Development Lab in collaboration with the USDOE.

Over the past six years, numerous federal, state, and local policy, research and practice organizations have used the framework to guide their work on family-school partnerships. To learn about the usefulness of the framework, I began collecting feedback from users, including a survey given to over 1,000 participants at the July 2017 IEL Family and Community Engagement Conference in San Francisco. Survey participants represented a broad range of organizational stakeholders—at the federal, state, and local levels—all of whom were using the current framework and whose work in the field was directly relevant.

The second version of the DCBF incorporates themes that emerged from the data collected and from advances in research. Five themes emerged among survey responses:

1) Respondents expressed that the relational process conditions could be greater emphasized as one of the necessary and early components of building partnerships with families. This finding is supported by Bryk and Schneider’s (2003) discussion of the key role of relational trust in school improvement efforts.

2)Respondents suggested that the framework need to pay more attention to practices that were culturally responsive and respectful of family voice, culture, and knowledge.

3) Respondents suggested that the overall design of the framework needed to express movement from ineffective to effective practices, representing the dynamic nature of change.

4) Respondents wanted the framework to express a coming together of families and educators.

5) In the first DCBF, respondents noted that the language on family/community engagement challenges from the perspectives of educators and families were identical. Respondents wanted to see a framework that reflected the distinct challenges that educators and families face. For example, descriptions of educators’ challenges may include a lack of teacher training in family engagement or deficit views of families; challenges facing families may include negative experiences in schools or the sense that their perspective is not valued or heard.

In this this presentation, I will discuss the key changes to the revised Framework as a grounding for the presentations in the symposium. In particular, I will emphasize how the respondent feedback, across five themes reflects a need for utilizing culturally responsive and sustaining models of family and community engagement in schools.

Author

• Karen L. Mapp, Harvard Graduate School of Education