Teaching to Transform: Rethinking Family Engagement Education Courses for Humanizing Home-School Relationships

• In Event: Critical Approaches to Family and Community Engagement in Early Childhood

Abstract

This paper looks at home-school connections in teacher education through the lens of transformative home-school engagement. Drawing on data from teacher reflections, focus groups, and interviews on their experience with a family engagement teacher education course, we consider what elements of family engagement in teacher education can potentially allow for teachers to make stronger connections between their relationships with families and larger historical trends of harm in the school system. This paper concludes with an overview of preliminary findings and changes made to the family engagement course in response to initial findings as well as a second round of data collection based around these changes.

Authors

• Anne Valauri, Georgia Southern University

• Jarvais J Jackson, Indiana University Indianapolis