Building Bridges for Multilingual Family-School-Community Engagement

• In Event: Dismantling Barriers and Centering Multilingual Families Through Humanizing, Critical Partnerships

Abstract

Objectives

With parent and family involvement being critical factors to student success, students from culturally diverse families often face additional barriers to home-school involvement (Blue-Banning et al.., 2010; Hornby & Lafaele, 2011; Norris & Collier-Stewart, 2018). Studies focused on the parental involvement of culturally diverse families provide further evidence of the importance of developing culturally responsive partnerships that are collaborative and facilitated through an intentional and effective inclusion of multicultural and multilingual families (Couchenour & Chrisman, 2014; Ladson-Billings, 1995). The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a qualitative instrumental case study of three Multicultural Counseling Assistants (MCAs) at two diverse urban K-8 schools in order to foster sustainable collaboration at the intersection of multilingual families, schools, and communities.

The research questions are as follows:



RQ1: How do MCAs and the Director of Family Engagement conceptualize the role of the MCAs?



RQ2: What types of bridging work do MCAs perform to build connections between multilingual families, schools, and communities?



Theoretical framework

We present our conceptual framework of a culturally responsive brokering, making use of Gay’s (1993) definition of brokering and Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth to demonstrate the critical importance of the work that MCAs do as cultural bridges between a student’s family and school. These two concepts synthesize the notion of cultural brokers in schools who are hired to support the needs of multilingual families and lay the theoretical grounding for this study.



Methods

The current study was taken from a larger qualitative investigation of multilingual family engagement in the 2019-2020 academic year to question whether and how the work of MCAs could be understood from a cultural brokering perspective as a bi-directional process between families and schools. An instrumental case study approach allowed for the purposeful sampling of participants and sites which includes three MCAs and one family director working at two K-8 schools in a large urban school district in the northeastern US.



Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

The data in this study includes four face-to-face semi-structured interviews which were transcribed, reviewed, and coded using a thematic coding approach. We observed the relations between MCAs and the wider community and developed a codebook for various forms of cultural bridging.

Findings

This study identifies three types of bridging work that MCAs created for the multilingual families they supported: (1) Bridging multilingual families and schools; (2) Bridging multilingual families across ethnic and linguistic backgrounds; and (3) Bridging multilingual families and the larger community.



Significance

This study proposes culturally responsive brokering as a reciprocal process of engaging multilingual families and schools, accounting for the cultural capital that families and communities possess. Our analysis draws upon concepts of culturally responsive education and reveals the cultural brokering work of three multilingual counseling assistants (MCAs). We interrogate traditional family engagement practices that schools often employ by elevating the work of MCAs in order to create systems of equity and access where multilingual families can be equal partners in their relationships with schools.

Authors

• Vera J. Lee, Drexel University

• Kristine Lewis Grant, Drexel University

• Karena Alane Escalante, The Education Trust