‘This is not right!’ Teachers telling stories about multilingual family engagement during COVID-19

Abstract

Many teachers collaborated with and spoke up for multilingual families during the pandemic. Yet, little is known about how and why teachers’ understanding of multilingual family engagement changed during remote teaching. This study gives six teachers from a school district with a small proportion of multilingual students a voice to tell their stories. Figured worlds theory and discourse analysis were used to interpret in-depth data to uncover how the figured world of multilingual family engagement developed for this group of teachers during COVID-19. Findings showed that even if these teachers dealt with the same challenges of remote teaching as other educators, they quickly began to realize how important partnerships with the families are. This new understanding resulted in a realignment of their actions. Moreover, these teachers became agents of change as they started to address inequities on behalf of their students which were increasingly made visible by the pandemic.

Keywords:

• teacher
• multilingual family engagement
• figured worlds
• discourse analysis
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the US 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.