A home-to-school approach for promoting culturally inclusive family–school partnership research and practice

Abstract

In this article, parental role construction is framed from a sociocultural perspective. Applying this perspective foregrounds the need for researchers and practitioners to gain an insider’s understanding of how families themselves construct their roles in supporting children’s education. By doing so, the field can reimagine family–school partnerships that are inclusive of normative family practices across ethnoculturally diverse families and develop interventions that build on cultural heritage, community strengths, and families’ funds of knowledge. In this article, a home-to-school, strengths-based conceptualization of family engagement that challenges deficit-based and school-centric orientations toward families is described. Evidence from three innovative research projects will be discussed that shows by being curious about how parents construct their roles and support their children at home (both directly and indirectly), researchers and practitioners can gain useful information to co-create more culturally inclusive and welcoming school environments, as well as more meaningful home–school connections.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the members of the Latino Family Involvement Project, RISE Project, and R-SUCCESS teams, too numerous to name, for their dedication and contributions to all phases of the work. To our Head Start partners (families, teachers, and administrators) in New York City and Boston, we will always be grateful for your trust and collaboration. To the Head Start children represented in this work, we hope you feel visible, respected, and celebrated for your strengths and the rich cultural communities you come from. We would like to recognize the anonymous reviewers whose feedback sharpened the overall communication.

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was supported by the following funders: The PEFL [National Institutes of Child & Human Development Grant 5R03HD50363-2; Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Head Start University English Language Learners Partnership Grant #90YR0043]; The RISE Project [National Science Foundation, Grant #1221065; 1621161; The Brady Education Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; private support from Ellen R. Cohen to Tufts University]; and the R-SUCCESS (The Brady Education Foundation; Brooke Astor Community Foundation/New York Community Trust).