Developing Home Visiting Skills to Support Equity-Oriented Collaboration With Linguistically Diverse Families

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Foregrounding Silenced Voices: Understanding and Supporting Schools' and Teachers' Engagement With Linguistically Marginalized Families

Abstract

Objective
Deep knowledge of children’s families, communities, and cultures is essential for effective teaching. Unfortunately, preservice and inservice teacher training tends not to adequately address issues of power, privilege, culture, or engaging effectively with families (Epstein, 2018; Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, & Napolitan, 2016). Without support to develop cultural competence - particularly when teachers’ and students’ backgrounds and experiences are misaligned - implicit biases are likely to affect teaching in ways that negatively affect already marginalized groups (Dee, 2005). Our objective was to explore how teachers engaged with families after receiving training to support this cultural competence.

Theoretical Framework, Method, and Data Sources
Our work is guided by positioning theory (Harré, 2012), which contends that different actors in an interaction have different rights and duties, and discourse locates those actors. Ourmodel for relationship-building home visiting was based on the Teacher Home Visit Project model. Visits were arranged in advance and were voluntary, teachers were trained and compensated for visits, and visits were conducted in pairs. We supplemented that model with implicit bias and assets-framing training for eight experienced teachers (4 pairs within a dual immersion bilingual program) at one public elementary school in the southeastern U.S. Teachers conducted home visits with all children in their class. We observed and took fieldnotes on teacher-family discourse in 16 of those visits (half with Spanish-speaking families; half English-speaking). We coded the home visit fieldnotes via a hybrid deductive/inductive process of first and second-round coding (Saldaña, 2014), focusing on interactional processes between teachers and families.

Results
We found evidence that conversations often centered on themes of pride and vulnerability expressed by the family to which teachers responded (1) deeply, (2) with simple acknowledgement, or (3) with no response. Disclosures of pride were more common among English-speaking families and the frequency of expressions of vulnerability were similar among English- and Spanish-speaking families. Additionally, teachers were more likely to respond with simple or deep acknowledgement to expressions of pride, and these responses were more likely in interactions with English- than Spanish-speaking families . . . In relation to disclosures of vulnerability, these presented a challenge for teachers in responding to all families, particularly when these involve difficult topics (i.e., divorce, immigration, bullying). These patterns suggest that disclosures of pride and vulnerability present opportunities for teacher engagement at different levels, and across different ethnolinguistic groups

Scholarly Significance
Home visiting has the potential to shift traditional roles by positioning teachers as learners and families as experts, but teachers must be trained on how to engage productively with families. While anti-bias and assets-framing training are necessary, they are not sufficient. Specifically, teachers may need support with developing relationship-building and relationship-sustaining skills across cultures, such as recognizing and ratifying expressions of pride and responding to expressions of vulnerability among all families. This is particularly important when teachers are working to build collaborative relationships with families who are from traditionally marginalized groups.

Authors

• Judy Paulick, University of Virginia

• Natalia Palacios, University of Virginia

• Amanda Kibler, Oregon State University

• Tatiana Yasmeen Hill, University of Virginia

• Melissa Lucas, University of Virginia