Teachers Making Sense of Families'/Children's Assets Through Home Visiting

• In Event: Educators Working Toward Equitable, Collaborative Engagement With Historically Marginalized Families: Developing Competence, Commitment, and Skill

Abstract

Objectives and Theoretical Framework
Relationship-building home visiting by teachers is associated with a variety of positive outcomes for children, families, and teachers (Henderson & Mapp, 2002; McKnight et al., 2019; Sheldon & Jung, 2018; Venkateswaran et al., 2018). Importantly, home visits are not simply parent-teacher conferences held in the home; ideally, they center and honor families. As a field, we know very little about the content of home visits other than that they may reproduce power imbalances found in schools (Park & Paulick, 2021; Paulick et al., 2023). We know even less about how, specifically, these visits impact teachers’ beliefs about children (McKnight et al., 2019).
Teachers often hold deficit-oriented beliefs particularly about families and children with minoritized identities (Ho & Cherng, 2018; Souto-Manning & Swick, 2006). Those beliefs may impede or even foreclose on the trust building necessary for equitable, productive relationships (Mapp & Bergman, 2021). The objective of this paper is to examine how elementary teachers who were trained to seek families’ assets during home visits understood and described children.
Methods
Our data come from a study of home visits by eight teachers with each of their students’ families in dual immersion Spanish-English classrooms in the southeastern United States. The teachers were trained to seek families’ and children’s assets. They wrote log entries before and after each visit, responding to prompts including: What do you already know about this child and their family?; and What did you learn during your visit?
Using a process of inductive coding, we compared patterns of assets before and after the visits to understand what teachers had learned about children through the visits. For this paper, four of our nine codes were most prominent. These were teachers’ descriptions of the following: 1) the child’s skills, activities, and hobbies; 2) the child’s dispositions; 3) the child’s behavior in school; 4) family dynamics, including caregivers’ hopes and dreams and interactions among family members.
Findings and Significance
In log entries prior to home visits, teachers focused mostly on what they knew based on the school context - they did not seem to know much about the children’s interests or families. After the visits, teachers focused on children’s interests. They also described children’s dispositions, but contextualized those dispositions within the family dynamics. Overall, teachers emerged from visits with a broader and more humanizing conceptualization of each child.
This work speaks to the importance of including (and training teachers to enact) family-centered aspects in family engagement programs rather than simply inviting families to partake in the life of the school. By centering the family, teachers broaden and humanize their understandings of children. This humanizing can support culturally responsive teaching in a variety of ways, since knowing children and families allows teachers to do the following: connect to children’s interests; “check” their own assumptions; honor students’ families’ values; and push back against injustice in solidarity with families. Furthermore, home visits through which teachers are genuinely asset-seeking help to build the trust required for authentic relationships by positioning teachers as curious, engaged partners (Mapp & Bergman, 2021).

Authors

• Judy Paulick, University of Virginia

• Natalia Palacios, University of Virginia

• Amanda Kibler, Oregon State University

• Aaron N. Blatt, University of Virginia