Working With and Supporting Families in School System
Text letters, email alerts, open houses, fundraising appeals, robocalls – parents know the drill. They are inundated with requests from children'due south schools.
These missives aren't really asking for date. Rather they tin exist viewed equally means for educators to tell parents what they should do to back up their students or the school. These experiences tin inadvertently communicate that schools alone know what's best for children – and parents should listen and follow directions, a dynamic especially present in schools serving working-class communities of colour.
As scholars and parents, my colleagues and I enquiry the intersection of families, schools and racial inequities. We have learned new ways for schools and families to piece of work together to help realize children's potential. And the answer isn't fundraising, checking the latest school app or listening to robo-calls.
Research tells us that families play a critically important role in the educational success of their children. We as well know from research that schools typically expect parents and families of color to conform to the values and behaviors of white, heart-class parents.
The hitch is that families of colour don't always participate in the ways schools expect. Histories of distrust and conflict often exist between families of colour and schools.
We know, for example, that at that place are well-documented racial disparities in subject field referrals, in access to loftier-quality teachers and instruction, and in resources and robust learning opportunities. Merely when parents raise questions about racial bias and inequities, their questioning, our research and other work has shown, it is rarely well received by educators and school leaders.
Rather than acknowledging these well-documented tensions and revising expectations, educators can interpret behaviors that deviate from their expectations equally testify that in that location's something wrong or lacking in families of color. A study past Dr. John Diamond and his colleagues found that when teachers decide parents don't intendance or are interfering with their professional authority, they tend to experience less responsible for those students' learning. These assumptions rely on age-one-time narratives that implicitly blame families of color – and have negative consequences, specially for Native American, blackness, Latinx, Pacific Islander and some Asian students.
Catalyzed past a charge from the 2014 White House Symposium on Transformative Family Engagement, we have been working on a different ready of approaches to co-design more "merely schools" with families. Based on the research of our national network of scholars and family unit leaders, Family Leadership Design Collaborative, schools and policymakers tin approach families differently. They can:
1. Start with families' and communities' priorities, non the school'due south agenda.
Families and communities need to be the architects of their ain futures. That ways starting with family stories, experiences, noesis and cultural practices. That might hateful recognizing negative histories with schools before jumping to solutions. For example, in Chicago'due south urban Ethnic community, families discussed the trauma of boarding schools and the erasure of Indigenous communities. They also shared their bequeathed cognition and stories of raising children to envision what educational activity would exist required to enhance "proficient elders." Parents in another district shared experiences of positive relationships with teachers simply also their frustrations dealing with bullying and racism at the school.
Later on sharing these experiences, they developed a curriculum for other parents to help them build relationships with each other to address problems of bullying and to support positive racial and cultural identities for their children.
ii. Recognize and treat families of color as experts on their own children.
When schools help families build relationships with each other and recognize their expertise, they can become powerful leaders in school alter. In Los Angeles, black and Latinx parent leaders with the organizing group CADRE changed the discipline policies in the district. And nonetheless, based on our inquiry, parents of color still felt blamed and judged in everyday conversations with teachers and principals about discipline – and there had been little change in the pipeline from schoolhouse to prison, specially for black boys. At present those parent leaders are collaborating with faculty at UCLA to help new teachers reshape everyday conversations to be less about blame and more about enabling parents to share their expertise on their ain children.
3. Give families and communities the resources, time and space to envision solutions, not just share their pain.
Listening sessions tin be powerful but limiting. Families share their traumas with educators, only school leaders ultimately decide what to do with what they heard. Our research shows how families can exist part of designing solutions if they are provided the fourth dimension, infinite and resources to do and then. For example, in Salt Lake City, a school determination-making body supposedly included parents, but families of color experienced meetings as alienating and exclusionary. We found rather than airing those negative experiences and expecting policymakers to do something, parents, teachers, principals, researchers and district leaders imagined what a productive council would exist like and started to enact those changes. They got the legislature to let them use funds for outreach to more diverse families. They created a comic to share with parents whose first language wasn't English. They are developing a grooming for educators on the councils to acquire how to engage differently. And they envisioned spaces prior to formal council meetings for parents to come together to discuss what their schools need almost.
4. Assistance families and educators learn to facilitate meetings across racial, cultural and other differences.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, most teachers and leaders in the U.S. are white, and a growing majority of students and their families are from communities of color. Collaborating across lines of race, civilization and roles requires skillful facilitation. Real tensions emerge between people and ideas in equity work. School and parent leaders demand to be able to intervene in tense interactions. That might be every bit simple as asking educators to irksome down, mind more and apply fewer acronyms. Only imbalances of power oft require skilled facilitation, like what to do when one loud voice dominates the conversation or when white parents inadvertently condone parents of colour.
Even parents of color tin reinforce these narratives. For instance, one grouping of immigrant parents in a diversifying suburban commune voiced a belief that other immigrant families are focused on meeting their immediate needs and don't intendance nigh their children's education. The facilitator at this session could accept gone with this simplistic explanation that blamed parents for disparate opportunities – a stereotype that empirical research has proven wrong. Instead, the facilitator leaned into the tension and shared her own challenges as a working parent who was ofttimes away from her child. Her vulnerability challenged the discourse of blame, and parents began to strategize most how they could better support each other collectively. Such facilitation skills must be learned, and schools and systems need to invest in developing those capacities.
5. Ensure families have real influence on of import educational decisions
School and commune leaders in our study came to run across the routine decisions they made in their jobs as critical opportunities for family and community influence. Educational leaders redesigned primal decisions that impacted students and families, especially those marginalized by typical processes.
For instance, ane principal supervisor in an urban commune redesigned the hiring process for a new master with students, families and teachers in the school. He enlisted a colleague who helped families discuss the broken trust they felt with the commune due to prior decisions, and so they collectively designed their ain questions for principal candidates. They held carve up pupil, family and teacher interview panels, then proposed their peak choice (which was unanimous, in this instance). The commune hired that principal, and several families wrote letters to the school board nigh how the process helped repair their cleaved trust with the commune.
These and other actions laid out in our full policy memo can recast families and communities as essential collaborators in fostering equitable schools and educational systems.
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Source: https://theconversation.com/5-new-ways-for-schools-to-work-with-families-120964
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