Leveraging the Children's Defense Fund Freedom Schools Model to Lift Up Caregiver-Driven Efficacy in Navigating Schools

• In Event: Still in the Struggle: Education for Liberation in Freedom Schools

Abstract

This paper will focus on gathered data throughout the summer of the CDF Freedom School Summer Program, through observations of each of the weekly meetings held for caregivers and interviews of caregiver participants. The interviews demonstrate how caregivers’ experiences inform their current navigation of schools and how CDF Freedom Schools shape that experience. The research presented highlighted an assets-based approach to parent involvement. Griffin and Galassi (2010) posited that one way in which school-family-community partnership barriers can be removed is by developing parents as resources. This paper aims to position caregivers as experts on the needs of their children and seek to position caregiver leaders as cultural brokers who help to translate (literally and figuratively) dominant school codes for caregivers from traditionally marginalized communities (Ishimaru et al., 2016). In addition, Yosso’s (2005) frame of community cultural capital as an analytic tool to position our analysis from an asset-based lens, rather than a subtractive or deficit-based perspective (Valenzuela, 1999).

Author

• Dani Parker Moore, Wake Forest University
  Presenting Author