Existing research suggests that immigrant families navigating the special education process are rarely positioned as powerful partners working alongside educators. This is a manifestation of the racism and ableism endemic to the United States schooling system that leads to educators viewing immigrant families from a deficit-based lens. Do these perceptions, however, match the ways that immigrant families view themselves? This qualitative participant-observation study addresses this question by exploring educators’ and families’ perceptions and positionings of immigrant families who are navigating special education. I unpack discrepant views among educators and families of 16 children labeled “English Learner” with or suspected of having disabilities. The findings indicate that the immigrant families see themselves as possessing tremendous community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), which counters the deficit-oriented view the educators have of them. I argue for a reframing of the common narratives surrounding immigrant families in special education away from deficit-based conceptions towards ones that honor the strengths, knowledge, and assets of the families.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused serious social disruptions and posed significant challenges to all families, especially immigrant families. Immigrant families who spoke languages other than English and who had young bilingual children faced numerous barriers as they struggled to navigate remote learning with their children without adequate language and technological support. The need to design action plans to mitigate the negative educational impact of the pandemic on immigrant families with young bilingual children was urgent. To address the immediate needs of immigrant families during the first year of the pandemic, this transformative mixed-methods study presents a family engagement and home learning program called the Home Connection. This program was collaboratively designed and implemented to support 20 immigrant families with 42 young bilingual children from the Metro and Greater Boston Areas. Focusing on the development, implementation, and evaluation of the Home Connection program, findings from this study demonstrate how the family participants actively engaged with and positively evaluated the program. These findings also suggest that family and community engagement play a crucial role in creating a more sustainable support system for immigrant families as well as equitable learning experiences for young bilingual children during and after the pandemic.

Abstract: Guided by the concept of “Pandemic as Portal” (Souto-Manning, 2021), this work utilizes ethnographic methods of inquiry and analysis to understand home–school relationships between Lisa, an African American preschool leader, and families at an early childhood center in the U.S. Midwest. Analysis of data from before and during the pandemic revealed continued themes of extended relationships between center leadership and families beyond preschool years, themes based in care over time, and political clarity of leadership. This political clarity drew on Lisa’s understanding of systemic racism and the school system that former students and older siblings would be entering. This paper also considers a disparity in the support and resources the center received, as it often had to rely on local problem-solving or established means and methods of communication to continue connecting with and supporting families throughout the pandemic, rather than turning to state or federal programs for support. Ultimately, the paper concludes that transformative and humanizing practices that developed before the pandemic helped guide the center through that time. The story of home-school relationships at this early childhood center provides examples of the potential to reimagine family engagement, avoiding a return to the “normalcy” of pre-pandemic home–school relationships across the U.S., which have historically been based in unequal power relationships that ignore systemic racism.

This article shares the history of the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program, an evidence-based international home visiting model. It highlights HIPPY’s unique approach to advancing equity by hiring program parents as home visitors. Further, the article shares stories of parents-turned-home visitors who ultimately transitioned into employment and other leadership posts in their community. As such, the article illustrates how HIPPY supports parents to develop their careers which accelerates equity at the individual and program levels.

In this essay, the authors reflect on the context and promise of Codesign and Theories of Change (TOC). Throughout my (MK) academic career, the Codesign work undertaken by the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC) has been one of the most inspirational, humanizing, and anti-colonial academic projects in which they have engaged or witnessed. The conveners, two women of Indigenous/Italian and Asian American descent, honored and humanized the knowledges and voices of all those who contributed to the Codesign – parents, community leaders and advocates, researchers, school leaders, and students. This is unusual in Western educational spaces that sit on colonial histories. The activities in the Codesign were designed to foster thinking and research outside of traditional educational structures and histories. This type of Codesign is also unusual in that it represents a break from the school-centric past in which people in the US typically confine themselves to dreaming within the educational histories and technologies.

What follows is a transcript of a conversation that was focused on the new family engagement core competency recommendations from the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement (NAFSCE). While it is not new to see specific recommendations for family engagement emerge – generally, these recommendations tend to be prescriptive in nature, grounded in Euro-centric ideologies, and school-centered. NAFSCE, however, has created competencies that, instead of centering what parents and families ought to be doing, emphasize power sharing and the transformation of traditional family, school, and community engagement practices. In addition, NAFSCE’s work has implications for all family-facing professionals, not just teachers and school administrators. Beyond the core competencies, we learn in our conversation more about how NAFSCE’s work around family, school, and community engagement is grounded in social justice and equity. This is especially critical given the fast-moving anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ policies being passed and proposed nationwide. We invite our readers to consider how we might leverage the work of NAFSCE to more authentically center families and communities within family, school, and community engagement.

In this paper, we share findings from Family Leadership Design Collaborative’s (FLDC) multi-year work, which comprised 10 co-design collaboratives engaged in historicizing their experiences and imagining transformative possibilities for education together. Using knowledge and interaction analysis (e.g., diSessa, Levin, & Brown, 2015) we examined collaboratives’ conceptual ecologies (Kelly & Green, 1998) to develop an empirical typology of collaboratives' theories of change (Tuck & Yang, 2018), or the broader aims and the who, what and how of their change-making conversations in community design circles, a first step of solidarity-driven codesign (Ishimaru et al., 2018). Across a diverse range of geographically, linguistically, and racially diverse families and communities, we intentionally rooted the design conversation in an initial set of principles in order to move beyond status quo problem-solving and open social dreaming spaces towards collective changemaking. We found: 1) a conceptual ecology of multiple theories of change both across contexts and within a given context; 2) systems-centric theories of change (premised on family deficiencies or institutional pragmatics) that constrained the dreaming of transformative possibilities; and 3) the increase of more expansive and transformative theories of change as the engagement was sustained and nurtured over time. We argue that sustained engagements that build politicized trust and the ability to grapple with tensions can deepen relational theorizing and enable groups to shape imaginative possibilities for pursuing and realizing change.

Imagining systemic change can be a lot to ask of Black and Latinx families in urban communities in light of long, sometimes intergenerational histories of marginalization and dehumanization in schools. For twenty years, CADRE (Community Asset Development Redefining Education) has been building the power and leadership of Black and Brown families in South Los Angeles “to protect and promote children’s dignity, opportunity to learn, and self-determination, by being at decision-making and policy-making tables and having the tools to monitor accountability in policy implementation.” When the community organizing group first engaged with the Family Leadership Design Collaborative (FLDC), CADRE had already successfully gotten the district to adopt new school discipline policies to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and had continued to monitor implementation (CADRE, 2017). However, the fundamental relationships and interactions between families and teachers in schools continued to reflect racist, dehumanizing ideologies entrenched in inequitable power dynamics. Maisie Chin, the Executive Director of CADRE, facilitated a series of codesign sessions with CADRE parents between 2017 and 2019 to not only surface these dynamics but to re-imagine how parent-teacher conversations and interactions might be different. CADRE co-designers undertook role-playing and collective reflection to intervene in moment-to-moment interactions as a way to change broader systemic dynamics.

School districts across the United States employ cultural brokers to help facilitate the involvement of multilingual families in their children’s schools. These liaisons build bridges over the cultural and language barriers that limit educational access and opportunities for multilingual families and their children. Despite the central role that cultural brokers play in fostering equitable and inclusive schools, their leadership may be unrecognized. In this qualitative case study, we examine the cultural brokering work performed by multilingual counseling assistants (MCAs) in two K-8 schools in a diverse urban school district in the northeastern United States. The primary data are face-to-face semi-structured interviews with three MCAs from the Burmese and Spanish-speaking school communities. We provide examples of how MCAs leverage the families’ cultural capital in various dimensions of social justice leadership. This study demonstrates the role of MCAs as social justice leaders in making schools more equitable and inclusive communities. This study argues that leadership can be a distributed practice within schools not limited to formal school administration.

This study examined the experiences of first-generation immigrant Latino parents of children with disabilities while navigating the special education system and how those experiences influenced their participation in the special education process. A researcher-created survey was used to collect data. Quantitative data were examined using descriptive and inferential statistics. Additional comments provided by participants were analyzed for patterns and themes. Although half of the participants had emerging English language skills, they communicated and often collaborated with school personnel. Most participants trusted professionals, had a positive perception of school personnel, and disagreed with statements suggesting that teachers knew best about their children’s needs. Participation in the special education process was influenced by the children’s disability and the parents’ knowledge of the American education system, among other factors.