Transforming educator identities and roles in family engagement through critical participatory action research

ABSTRACT

Transformative approaches are essential for teachers, researchers, and teacher educators to rethink their identities and roles and to position themselves as both collaborators with and learners from immigrant families and communities. In this article, we share how Transformational Theory and Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) creates conditions for teachers to engage in professional learning that centers on immigrant and refugee families. In collaboration with immigrant and refugee community advocates, we used CPAR to understand the needs and desires of immigrant and refugee families, to integrate that information into our curriculum, and to support teachers to work with families to pursue shared lines of inquiry embedded in their everyday lives, experiences, and needs. We describe positive shifts in teacher identity and perceptions as teachers prioritized families over school structures and processes, and we share challenges we encountered such as the power imbalances connected to our positionality as white native English speaking researchers working in linguistically diverse communities of color.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional resources

1. Equitable Parent-School Collaboration at the University of Washington https://www.education.uw.edu/epsc/?_ga=2.117559435.365995209.1576426824-1786017874.1576426824.

The Equitable Parent-School Collaboration at the University of Washington is committed to equitable access for underserved students and families through family-school-community partnerships. The website provides curriculum, tools, and research that can be used to support family engagement initiatives at school and district levels.

2. Koyama, J., & Bakuza, F. R. (2017). A timely opportunity for change: Increasing refugee parental involvement in U.S. schools. Journal of Educational Change, 18, 311–335. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10833-017-9299-7.

In this study, Koyama and Bakuza document how refugee families worked with a community organization to gain the cultural and social capital to fully participate in partnership with schools. In particular, they explore refugee families’ past experiences with schooling, desires for their children, and hopes for being part of the school community. They document the hurdles some schools had in place that were grounded in deficit views of refugees, immigrants, and multilingual students and families and that discouraged refugee family engagement.

3. Teaching for Change. https://www.teachingforchange.org/parent-organizing/our-approach.

Teaching for Change is an organization with a culturally and linguistically diverse board that focuses on school reform grounded in the lived experiences of teachers and families. Their parent engagement programs are “based on the concepts of story-sharing, community organizing, and popular education. Rather than entering schools with a fixed agenda, Teaching for Change starts by making connections through sharing stories, allowing concerns to emerge and looking for ways to address them.” The site also provides resources for educators, including recommended reading lists, videos, and lessons.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US Department of Education, Office for English Language Acquisition, National Professional Development Grant 2016, Award #T365Z160155.