Teacher Shared Leadership for Engaging With Immigrant Families

• In Event: Partnering With Immigrant Families and Communities

Abstract

Schools often experience challenges connecting with and supporting families of children who are immigrants and refugees. Frequently, the responsibility for family engagement for these families falls upon English as a second language (ESL) and/or bilingual faculty and staff, with minimal to no engagement from content area teachers, administrators, and/or families. In a collaboration among local immigrant families, K-12 educators, and university teacher educators, we worked to shift this family engagement paradigm to a shared leadership model. In this paper, we describe what K-12 educators identified as factors that facilitated and challenged this shift from distributed to shared leadership among immigrant families, language educators, and content educators.

Authors

• Kathryn A. Brooks, Butler University
  Presenting Author

• Catherine D. Bhathena, Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis
  Presenting Author