From Communication to Connection: Multilingual Family Engagement Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Foregrounding Voices: Understanding and Supporting Schools' and Teachers' Engagement With Linguistically Marginalized Families and Communities

Abstract

Objective
The Teachers Educating All Multilingual Students (TEAMS) project supports teachers in five Oregon school districts in developing knowledge and skills for educating multilingual learners. Participating teachers complete coursework leading to a state endorsement in ESOL or Dual Language specialization, supported by facilitators and administrators in each district. TEAMS teachers partner with local community organizations to deepen knowledge and skills in multilingual community engagement. Due to COVID-19, family engagement efforts in the project shifted suddenly and unexpectedly from event planning to connection with families focused on their day-to-day needs. The concurrent racial justice protests further pushed teachers to think about multilingual family engagement in new ways. This study addresses a key question that emerged from this shift: How did TEAMS teachers’, facilitators’, and administrators’ conceptions of and actions to support multilingual family engagement shift in response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

Theoretical Framework
As schools transitioned from in person to remote learning, we began to consider the role of teacher agency through the lens of a structure-agency dialectic (Varelas, et al., 2015), highlighting teachers’ actions within and against systems that served to constrain and channel their potential actions. While this framing has been useful in past studies of teacher decision making (Buxton et al., 2015), in this case, the framing failed to capture the critical liberatory questions that teachers began to express. Thus, we shifted our framing of teacher agency to one informed by liberatory pedagogies and specifically by Bobbie Harro’s (2000) Cycle of Liberation. This framing recognizes teacher agency as supporting an evolution from individual action to collective action to structural change (Ramírez & González, 2012).

Data Sources and Methods
A total of 42 teachers from five Oregon districts participated in cohort two of the TEAMS project between summer 2019 and winter 2021. Each school district had a district administrator assigned to the project who coordinated with a TEAMS facilitator to support the teachers in that district. Three sets of focus group interviews were conducted in each district (in fall 2019, spring 2020, and winter 2021) with the teachers, and separately, with the district administrator and facilitator pair. Transcripts were analyzed using the six phases of Harro’s cycle of liberation: waking up; reaching out; building community; coalescing; creating change; maintaining change.

Findings and Significance
Pre-pandemic, teachers expressed few examples of critical incidents prompting them to wake up to educational and broader social inequities. By spring 2020, the intersection of TEAMS experiences, the global pandemic, and national protests for racial justice led some teachers to start engaging in the cycle of liberation as they questioned structures they had previously seen as inevitable or unproblematic. This led teachers to focus on building authentic and multidirectional connections with families rather than prioritizing one way communication of information from school to home. By the winter of 2021, some teachers had deepened their liberatory orientation toward creating change while other teachers expressed less critical perspectives as they looked beyond the pandemic toward a return to “normal” schooling.

Authors

• Cory A. Buxton, Oregon State University

• Kathryn Esther Mcintosh, Oregon State University

• Barbara Ettenauer, Oregon State University