Family-School (Dis)Engagement: Understanding What It Is, What It’s Not, and What to Do About It

Michelann M Parr,Marianne Vander Dussen

doi:10.20360/g26g6f

Abstract

This paper traces the journey of a community of schools, bound together by a geographical radius that sees some students travelling one hour each direction, as they attempt to interrupt institutional discourses and question the assumptions that underlie family-school engagement practices through collaborative inquiry and community-based research. We offer reconsideration of family (dis)engagement, and a set of principles to guide family-school engagement that recognizes the diversity of the relationship, and the need for both families and schools to meet each other where they are, repositioning both parties as partnered, harmonic voices in the education of children.

Highlights

(Dis)Engagement: Exploring the Myth School-initiated family engagement typically aims to improve the family-school connection, keep families informed, and help families understand what it is that schools do on a day-to-day basis
In our thoughts, our assumptions, and our practices, we were guilty of sustaining a myth of parentengagement, a myth grounded in the notion that families needed to shape up and do more at home in order to help their children be successful in life and in learning, a myth that is reflective of dominant mainstream literacies and definitions of success
Concluding Remarks: Getting From Where We Are to Where We Could Be Over the years, and today in retrospect, we’ve come to understand that families do the best that they with the resources they have in any given moment; they make decisions in the best interests of their families and children, and sometimes that means that they reject the school knows best narrative, privileging instead what they know best – their children

Summary

Introduction

(Dis)Engagement: Exploring the Myth School-initiated family engagement typically aims to improve the family-school connection, keep families informed, and help families understand what it is that schools do on a day-to-day basis. In our thoughts, our assumptions, and our practices, we were guilty of sustaining a myth of parent (dis)engagement, a myth grounded in the notion that families needed to shape up and do more at home in order to help their children be successful in life and in learning, a myth that is reflective of dominant mainstream literacies and definitions of success. Perhaps it was this narrow conceptualization of familyschool engagement that marginalized and silenced some families, leaving them feeling that their children’s learning was not a place they felt they belonged. What might appear to be (dis)engagement on the school landscape might be something completely different as viewed by a family; what might appear to be (dis)engagement to a family might be something completely different as viewed by a school

Methods

Conclusion