Conceptualizing Families Engaged in Education: A Micro-Ethnography of Sense-Making Repertoires in Co-Design Research

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Family and Community Involvement in Education: Anticolonial and Equity-Centered Approaches (Table 21)

Abstract

This paper presents a framework - conceptions of families engaged in education - that expands our sensemaking repertoires to envision and enact equitable partnering processes. I take a microethnographic approach to examine a series of community design circles (n = 35). I found ecologies of conceptions that develop, stabilize, and destabilize as co-designers theorize local definitions of educational justice and community wellbeing, and in so doing, navigate multiple roles, perspectives, and expertise on the issues and potential solutions. This paper presents implications for educational researchers to remain vigilant to divisive logics that constrain social changemaking, and seed agentic and relational conceptions in partnering processes that can desettle hierarchical power matrices.

Author

• Charlene Montano Nolan, Western Washington University