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Title
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Designing for Culturally Responsive Family Engagement: The Seeds of a Participatory Action Research Project
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Abstract/Description
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Purpose: The purpose of this research is to conduct a participatory action research project with families to understand how families in a small Northeastern city with a high population of Latino@s and immigrants can contribute to developing more culturally responsive family engagement practices in the districts’s schools. We will begin with three design circles starting in August 2016 to set our collective research agenda.
Rationale/Theoretical Background: This research builds upon several years of existing research our team has conducted on family engagement in this city. We have found that despite the many inclusive family engagement practices the school district employs, many teachers, and some school leaders, continue to view families through a cultural deficit lens (Solorzano, 1997). In contrast to the cultural deficit lens, the framework of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) highlights the specific strengths that families of color gain as a result of surviving and thriving in a racist and xenophobic society. Through this lens, educators can implement “culturally responsive family engagement,” integrating the funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992) of culturally and linguistically diverse families into curriculum, pedagogy, and school governance. Culturally responsive family engagement is an extension of culturally responsive teaching; to better understand their students, teachers must better understand their families. Our goal is to collaborate with parents to learn how these strengths-based frameworks can become normative throughout district schools.
Methods: We are planning to conduct a year-long participatory action research (PAR) project with families in this city. The design circles will function as the first three meetings of our research team, which will consist of six parents and two researchers (the co-authors of this proposal). These meetings will serve to generate a sense of community among the research team and a specific “how can” research question to pursue for the remainder of the academic year. The general focus of the PAR project and the design circles will be: “How can families contribute to developing culturally responsive family engagement in > schools?” The community research team will determine the specific research questions, methods, and analytic plan, but the community cultural wealth framework will guide every stage of the process.
Implications: We anticipate that because we are employing a participatory action research process, this research will result in tangible changes that are driven by strong public will. For example, our PAR team might create school- and district-wide governing bodies that allow for authentic parent decision-making or a leadership training for parents to help them recognize the valuable contributions they can make to equitable learning opportunities, curriculum and pedagogy, and school climate. Lessons from this process will be disseminated with the broader fields of family engagement, parent leadership, action research, and culturally responsive education.
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Date
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April 29, 2017
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At conference
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AERA Annual Meeting
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IRE Approach/Concept
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Design Circles
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Participatory Action Research (PAR)
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Family Engagement
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Citation
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Geller, J., & Alcantara, V. (2017). Designing for Culturally Responsive Family Engagement: The Seeds of a Participatory Action Research Project. AERA Annual Meeting, San Antonio.
Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC)
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