School Is Where The Home Is: Building Connections, Dismantling Myths, Reaching Families

• In Event: School Is Where the Home Is: Building Connections, Dismantling Myths, Reaching Families

Abstract

The overall objective of the session is to highlight educator insights, lessons learned, and how their positionalities were challenged through their involvement in a highly synergistic, interactive, and responsive family engagement process rooted in the cultural and linguistic contexts and milieus of their students. The session will share the steps involved in a family engagement process starting with a pre-assessment of students’ funds of identities, the creation of open-ended questions for the families, a collaborative group discussion with peers, and a reflection journal that followed the family visit. Further educator voices, themes, and insights will be shared as the participating educators explored and navigated this family engagement process. The post-reflection process by these educators resulted in the examination of families’ dreams and aspirations regarding their students and rethinking the goal that a family might have for their students.
Through the presentation of themes, anecdotes, and testimonials that emerged from these family visits, the session aims to showcase how teachers’ positionalities and views regarding family engagement were strengthened, challenged, and often affirmed. Educators involved in the process were primarily from a monolingual/ monocultural white background working in three extremely diverse school districts in the heart of the Midwest. Through a well-thought-out family engagement process rooted in Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological theory (1979, 2001), Social Capital theory (Bourdieu, 1986), and Funds of Knowledge theory (Moll, 1992, 2018) educators identified and referenced their students’ funds of knowledge and funds of identity (Estaban-Guitart & Moll, 2014) as a starting point for their family visits. Next, this process took educators through a careful selection of open-ended questions to be asked from the family members/guardians. The culmination of this visit is a teacher reflection journal (Herrera, 2022) wherein the educators reflect upon their initial assumptions/fears about the family visit while discussing the learnings gained regarding their students’ and families’ socio-cultural view of themselves and the relationship they have come to form as individuals within the broader contexts in which they are situated.
Educators, district personnel, and our policymakers across the country are constantly troubled by and looking for the answers to the question: In what ways can teachers increase family and parental participation, especially within our diverse communities? However, as we look at the possibilities in the field and talk to teachers, one thing becomes quite clear, the whole idea of family involvement still stays very much a school-led initiative where parents are invited to be a part of the educational process through traditional ways such as parent-teacher conferences and parent nights as literacy or math nights. The results of these well-intended efforts often mean unsystematic actions on the part of the schools regarding family involvement. As a result, students' and families’ core cultural and linguistic competencies (Kim, 2020) often remain untapped. This session aims to further these conversations by sharing this research-based family engagement process that sparked multiple conversations and reflective opportunities among the participating educators to create alternative modes of involving culturally and linguistically diverse families in their schools and classrooms.

Authors

• Shabina Kavimandan, Kansas State University

• Rachael Smith, Georgia Southern University

• Latania Marr y Ortega, Manhattan-Ogden USD383