Hidden Boundaries: Family-School Partnerships in a Multicultural Classroom

• In Event: Parental Involvement in Education

Abstract

Family-school partnerships are widely recognized as central to children's educational success, though how engagement is defined and enacted is never culturally neutral. Drawing on Funds of Knowledge as an analytical framework, this study examines how institutional constructions of family engagement are experienced differently across cultural and positional lines in a multicultural early childhood classroom. Through an intrinsic case study of two teachers and two parents from distinct cultural backgrounds, findings reveal that families' everyday forms of support tend to remain invisible within school frameworks that privilege visible, school-centered participation. The involvement of culturally aligned staff emerged as critical to bridging communication gaps, while cultural responsiveness remained informal and relational rather than embedded in institutional structures, pointing to deeper asymmetries in whose knowledge and ways of engaging are treated as legitimate.

Authors

• Zhiyue Lu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Stephanie C. Sanders-Smith, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign