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Family Engagement in Literacy: Moving from Monologue to Dialogue and Focusing on Joy to Promote Family Engagement in Literacy
By Laurie Elish-Piper
Document: Column
Introductory Paragraph:
A new school year always brings excitement and opportunities for a fresh start. This year, however, there seems to be a greater need for a reset in the post-COVID-19 era where face-to-face teaching, learning, and events will form the foundation for our work as educators. In addition, the lessons we learned about using digital technologies during the pandemic remain, providing us with tools to enhance our connections with families through virtual meetings, hybrid events, and online teaching and learning tools. In fact, technology has proven to be a useful tool to increase conference attendance, home–school communications, and access to school events (Wilinski et al., 2022), which will likely persist even with our return to in-person interactions and events with families. This past year was especially challenging as we emerged from the pandemic to see more students struggling academically, socially, and emotionally. Concurrently, teachers reported facing increased levels of stress (Wong & Jimenez, 2023). A story on National Public Radio highlighted three teachers from across the United States who shared their first-hand experiences with increased mental health issues, challenging classroom behavior, and student apathy and disengagement, which led them all to identify the need to adjust and update how we teach and support students (Contreras et al., 2023). Research shows that family engagement promotes improved academic outcomes, social skills, and classroom behavior for students (Annie E Casey Foundation, 2022; Cosso et al., 2022), and Ferlazzo (2011) argues that it contributes to better classroom environments. These reasons provide a compelling case for why prioritizing family engagement early this school year is an important and impactful goal. Therefore, in this column, I offer two broad ideas for launching strong family engagement efforts to get the school year off to a great start: (1) shifting from one-way communication to dialogues with families and (2) approaching family engagement through a lens of joy and celebration.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.51.4.2023.54
Page Numbers: 54-58
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