Teachers Strengthening Partnerships With Multilingual Families During the Pandemic

Abstract

The authors describe lessons learned from research on how teachers and districts can better support the education of multilingual learners—including insights gained from remote learning in response to COVID-19—through deepening relationships and understandings with multilingual families.

Keywords:

• anti-racist education
• COVID-19
• family engagement
• multilingual learners

The Teaching All Multilingual Students (TEAMS) project is an ongoing, federally funded research and development effort to support teachers and district administrators in multiple Oregon school districts in developing new knowledge and skills for effectively educating multilingual students. Districts identify cohorts of interested teachers from across all grade levels and content areas, as well as a district administrator and a cohort facilitator (typically a retired teacher or teacher educator) to provide support to project teachers from that district. Participating teachers complete online coursework leading to a state endorsement in ESOL or dual-language instruction and engage in monthly district support sessions with the cohort facilitator to apply what they learn in the coursework to their daily teaching practice. To deepen teachers’ knowledge and skills about family and community engagement, participating teachers also partner with local community organizations to co-design and co-plan education-focused community events with families of multilingual students.

The corresponding research project was an effort to disseminate lessons for other teachers and district leaders on strengthening connections with multilingual families to better support students’ academic progress (Civil et al., 2020; Delgado-Gaitán, 2012). We (the authors) report on lessons learned from this research, with implications for teaching practice and teacher professional learning.

When the COVID-19 pandemic required K–12 teachers to shift to remote instruction in spring 2020, TEAMS teachers, like most across the country, saw their relationships with students and families transformed suddenly and radically (Hamilton et al., 2020). Unlike many teachers, however, TEAMS teachers already were engaging with their multilingual families to create new teaching partnerships. Thus, we repurposed our conversations with participating school districts to focus on the emerging question: How have you worked to engage all families, and particularly multilingual families, in new ways as you shifted to remote instruction, and what lasting changes may result?

A total of 42 teachers from five Oregon school districts as well as five district administrators and five cohort facilitators participated in the second cohort of the TEAMS project between October 2019 and March 2021. These participants worked across a broad range of contexts from urban to rural and spanned new teachers to seasoned veterans. We conducted focus group interviews with each district at three points in time: fall 2019, prior to the pandemic; spring 2020, soon after the shift to remote learning; and fall 2020/winter 2021, during the second school year impacted by the pandemic. Overall, this resulted in 15 teacher focus groups and 15 interviews with the administrator/facilitator pairs.

Through our subsequent case-based analysis using a grounded theory approach (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016), our team of four university researchers identified eight themes that shaped teachers’ and district administrators’ responses as they strategized new ways to understand and support a range of interrelated familial issues. We divided these themes into those that focused on families’ immediate needs and those that focused on planning for more equitable education moving forward. Perhaps most significant for long-term planning, changes in the interactions with students’ families during remote instruction led many TEAMS teachers to see racial inequities more clearly and to offer personal and professional experiences that resonated with the movement for racial justice that was unfolding in the national news during 2020.

Responding to Families’ Immediate Needs

The abrupt shift to remote learning fundamentally changed the nature of communication between teachers and their students. Daily in-person interactions were replaced by emails and phone calls that often went unanswered and Zoom classes where teachers faced mostly blank screens as students opted, for a variety of reasons, not to turn on their video cameras. In their own coursework, TEAMS teachers had been learning about the value of home visits and other community-based family engagement strategies. When emails and Zoom proved to be insufficient modes of communication, TEAMS teachers took it upon themselves to seek out more authentic communication. While recognizing the challenges of conducting home visits during the pandemic, TEAMS teachers also perceived their value for increasing empathy and understanding, improving engagement outcomes, and forming closer personal connections. Thus, multiple TEAMS teachers organized outdoor home visits to talk face-to-face (at a distance) with students and families. In doing so, they quickly realized that, for many students and families, the decreased engagement and communication about academics was a direct result of dealing with more immediate family needs.

I was having a hard time connecting with some families and I realized it’s not that they don’t care about school, it’s that they can’t care if they are also facing food insecurity and medical challenges and all these things. I have to understand those needs. (District 1, teacher 4)

Food and Housing Insecurity

Teachers quickly recognized that food and housing insecurity were immediate and pressing needs for some of their school families (Niles et al., 2020). TEAMS teachers advocated for an increasingly robust set of supports for basic needs that began with making food available for families to pick up at school sites, expanded to providing food delivery to homes for families who could not get to school, and went as far as exploring how schools could help alleviate housing insecurity by seeking small grants. TEAMS teachers became increasingly insistent that their schools should prioritize basic needs before students could be expected to focus on virtual learning.

We’ve been doing a lot of home visits that we’ve been inspired to do because of TEAMS. And from the beginning, it was really about food and housing security. We asked families, where are you at? Do you have plans for getting food? Let’s connect you with something. And then growing our own meal program. As a district we had certain sites, and we grew our sites, and then we added using a bus and we also had delivery. We started a delivery process for families who said, “I just can’t get there.” (District 2, facilitator)

Mental Health

As both the actual needs and teachers’ awareness of those needs increased, TEAMS teachers also began to hear about and observe more mental health challenges among their students’ families. This awareness prompted numerous conversations among TEAMS teachers about trauma-informed pedagogy (Brunzell et al., 2019) and other current thinking on how teachers and schools can better integrate positive mental health supports into classroom practices. This awareness also prompted more lighthearted and playful responses, such as taking pets on home visits to play with the children.

I was dropping off things to some of my multilingual families. In this one community, the fear of COVID was so extreme that a lot of the families were staying very cooped up inside. My white Labrador is a registered therapy dog, so I made a point to include him in our WebEx videos and on our packet pickups. He would come around and the kids loved him; he brought more smiles through all of this than anything else we did. (District 4, teacher 1)

Technology

For a number of years, teachers and schools have been challenged by equity issues around technology access, usage, and support, because learning through technology plays an increasingly central role both in school and at home (Dolan, 2016). This digital divide, ranging from Wi-Fi access to available hardware and software to support for troubleshooting, reached a critical point in the shift to remote learning, when access to certain technologies at home became a requirement for access to learning (Seymour et al., 2020). TEAMS teachers noticed nested levels in the digital divide that could not be solved as easily as loaning school laptops to students.

One thing we got on quickly was parent connectedness and communication. We asked, what do you have in terms of technology at home? And so people are saying, “yeah, we’ve got technology.” And then we thought, well, no, they actually don’t have a laptop. They have a smartphone, but that’s really not sufficient to do the online work that students need to do. And then we found out that not everybody has Wi-Fi. So, we’ve discovered that it’s a much larger gap than we thought in terms of families and parents really even feeling comfortable getting on and using a laptop versus their phone. (District 3, facilitator)

Overall, TEAMS teachers recognized that until families’ basic needs were met, focusing their family engagement efforts on students’ academic assignments and whether they were getting behind was not sensible nor feasible. While the pandemic’s scope and scale made these issues increasingly visible, TEAMS participants also noted that the lack of basic needs in many families both predated COVID-19 and would continue long after the pandemic ended.

Planning for More Equitable Education

The direct actions that TEAMS teachers took, such as food delivery and home technology support, were reactive measures that proved largely ephemeral in the transition back to more typical in-person schooling. A second set of shifts occurred, however, with the potential to cause more lasting change. The new understandings and relationships that the teachers were building with families allowed them to more clearly view how material inequities (e.g., in housing and health resources) were driven by deeper structural inequities in the underlying social systems, within and beyond public education.

From Seeing Inequities to Anti-Racist Action

The protests for racial justice and against police brutality that were occurring simultaneously with the pandemic in 2020 (Gibson et al., 2021), as well as the ongoing coursework that TEAMS teachers were completing, supported these teachers in making new connections between the structural inequities they were seeing in their daily remote interactions with students and systemic racism they may have previously denied. Through their direct work with multilingual families, they began to see new evidence that the system they worked in was part of the problem. Some TEAMS teachers looked for new ways to take more direct action to become part of the solution.

We started a new leadership development group to become instructional leaders around anti-racist practices. Teachers had to submit an application and talk about why they wanted to be a part of this. I noticed that there was a solid handful of our TEAMS teachers who applied for this cohort and mentioned their experiences and learning from TEAMS as part of their motivation for wanting to be part of this anti-racist teacher leadership group. (District 4, administrator)

Conversations in Our Families, Too

Because many of the TEAMS teachers, administrators, and facilitators were also parents of school-aged children, their thinking about racial justice and education crossed over to their home life in addition to their professional work. Teachers found themselves engaging in conversations about race and racism with their own children and families—conversations that pushed them to think more deeply about implications for their work as educators as well as their role as parents.

That has been really kind of a beautiful thing to be pushed into having those deeper conversations at home that are right there in front of you, versus if life was still what it was. But the TV has certainly brought anti-racism into my daughter’s life. How do I raise a strong daughter with a good heart who is not afraid of conversations that I myself may not even know how to have? (District 2, facilitator)

Humanizing the Education System

Teachers expressed ways that new interactions with students’ families brought them closer together, lowering barriers that traditionally separate schools and families. While seemingly counterintuitive, the shift to remote learning led some teachers to express a more humanizing vision of family engagement (Domina et al., 2021). As teachers came to depend more on parents during remote learning, they opened new channels of communication, recognizing that being available to parents when the parents were available could require exceptional commitment.

I was always hesitant to give my phone number or text or communicate really closely, like intimately with families. But since I’ve been doing that constantly now, I’ll be much more comfortable providing different ways to access me and communicate with me in the future and really encouraging that with families. (District 3, teacher 2).

Resources for Thriving Under Adversity

Immigrant and multilingual community assets include strategies for surviving and thriving under oppressive and uncertain conditions (Zipin, 2009). TEAMS teachers learned to see these strengths during the pandemic, even as many families struggled. As a greater proportion of students faced serious adversity during the pandemic, teachers were learning to lean on the strengths of their multilingual families.

I think what I’ve learned is that I want to welcome parents more into my classroom. Bring whatever you know, and let’s work together. Let’s be a team because everybody has something they can share. I think that over this period of time, not only have I appreciated the parents on a different level, but they have appreciated me as well. So, while this pandemic is serious and has been detrimental, it has also kind of enlightened me. (District 4, teacher 2)

Closing Thoughts

Among the many impacts of COVID-19 on education, the widespread shift to virtual instruction served as a disrupter of school norms and teacher practices that typically guide and shape the ways in which teachers and families interact (Colao et al., 2020). One outcome was that the pandemic caused many teachers to wake up to numerous structural inequities in our education systems, while offering new possibilities for connection with their students’ families (Jones et al., 2021).

However, as school systems have returned to updated versions of in-person instruction, we may forget what we have seen and learned in our desire to return to more comfortable and familiar norms and structures (Cahapay, 2020). If we take one lesson from the experiences of participants in the TEAMS project and how they taught through the pandemic, it is this: Committed educators find creative and innovative ways to support their students under the most challenging circumstances, but structural inequities built into our society are bigger than individual responses can meaningfully address. Only when we build a collective and inclusive exchange of voices and ideas can we create meaningful collective action that can bring lasting change for the common good. Projects such as TEAMS can provide exemplars of how to support such collaboration.

At our most optimistic, we see the pandemic-induced upheaval of public schooling as an accelerator of necessary educational transformations in response to our changing academic expectations and our evolving national conversations about race, justice, and immigration. As both teachers and teacher educators recognize that all families face new challenges and require new skills for educational success in uncertain times, we might view our immigrant and multilingual families as guides to help us create a more just and equitable education system for all. We sum up with a quote that highlights the raised consciousness that TEAMS participants expressed in their efforts to create a vision of educational transformation.

I don’t see us going back to how we used to have school because how we used to have school didn’t meet all of our families’ needs and our students’ needs. If we go back to what we have been, we haven’t done this well. We’ve got this crisis, and we have to make changes. So, let’s really think about the changes we need to make, and let’s do that hard work. The TEAMS project helped us connect with the new learning opportunities that will need to be created. (District 2, facilitator)

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition (#T365Z160134). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funder. Human Subjects (IRB) approval: This study was reviewed and approved by the IRB at Education Northwest. IRB approval #67.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cory Buxton

Cory Buxton is a Professor of science education. Email: [email protected]

Kathryn McIntosh

Kathryn McIntosh is an Associate Professor of ESOL/bilingual and literacy education. Email: [email protected]

Barbara Ettenauer

Barbara Ettenauer is a doctoral research assistant. Email: [email protected]

Jamey Burho

Jamey Burho is a post-doctoral research associate. Email: [email protected]