Home-School Relationships as a Dimension of Educational Equity During the Pandemic: Perspectives From Teachers

• In Event: Pedagogy of the Pandemic: What Teachers' Experiences Reveal About Educational (In)Equity and (In)Justice During COVID

Abstract

Purpose
This paper explores the impact of home-school relationships during COVID on vulnerable student populations, including students with disabilities, students living in poverty, and students from minoritized racial and Indigenous backgrounds. While we explicitly do not equate coming from an otherwise-marginalized background with having a disability, we did find that the pandemic impacted home-school relationships for these populations during in similar ways.

Theoretical Framework:
Parental engagement and involvement have been repeatedly shown to have significant association with students’ achievement and lower rates of delinquency (Boonk, et al., 2018; Epstein & Sheldon, 2016). Schools that report higher levels of engaged families report higher attendance rates and lower dropout rates (Yamauchi et al., 2017). Trust, advocacy and communication are the center of establishing home- school partnerships (Collier, Keeffe & Hirrel, 2015; Murray et al., 2018).
This paper also draws on poststructural, New Materialist, relational, and process ontologies. Brian Massumi (2013) asserts that “a making is always bigger than the made” (xi). As such, teaching and learning are conceptualized as intrinsically, irrevocably, and necessarily relational and in process. This conceptualization of home-school relationships as processes and as agentic in themselves allows us to locate agency not merely in teachers or in students/families as individuals but in the “entanglements” (Barad, 2007) in which they participate; thus, we analyze the circulation of affects, larger political environments, and historical injustices as they impact specific home-school relationships.

Data Sources and Methods
Semi-structured interviews and targeted follow-up interviews, also conceptualized as processes, were conducted as part of a larger team research project in spring and summer 2020 in order to explore these dynamics. However, we draw upon Jackson & Mazzei (2012) practice of “thinking with theory” when analyzing the interview data, recognizing theory and data co-constitute one another.

Results and Substantiated Conclusions
We conclude that home-school relationships are of importance for students in any situation that requires distance learning. This study provides evidence that this is especially true for students with high needs or from communities where trust levels with schools are low for a variety of historical, cultural, and political reasons. In these latter circumstances, we find that teacher resilience and determination to enhance home-school relationships, more than any specific technique or strategy, were essential to delivering responsiveness tailored to the needs of each individual family. This in turn suggests that, at least in the near term, teacher professional development should focus on supporting teachers’ creative adaptation to the circumstances of families and children, collaborative innovation, and knowledge sharing—rather than prescriptive techniques and generic mandates for providing services.

Scholarly Significance
This study offers an analysis of a part of teaching—fostering and sustaining home-school relations—not frequently emphasized in teacher education curricula and research. It documents how the move to remote teaching during the COVID pandemic has increased stakes of these relations for underserved students. At the most general level, it contributes to the teacher education literature that frames teachers as critical problem solvers and knowledge generators (Shulman, 1987; Vavrus, n.d.; Zeichner, 1983).

Authors

• Mary R. Adkins-Cartee, University of Oregon

• Dana Cohen Lissman, University of Oregon