Ethnocultural Diversity and the Home-to-School Link

This book explores family-school partnerships and how they can be most effectively leveraged to ensure academic success for students from socioculturally diverse backgrounds. It presents an innovative framework for building collaborative learning partnerships with culturally diverse families, for improved student achievement and more meaningful ties between schools and their communities. It promotes understanding of familial and communal knowledge and recognizing families’ resilience in addressing academic, social, and linguistic barriers. Chapters reimagine family-school partnerships within a context of shared power and authority, examine a spectrum of interventions that support culture-based modes of learning, and emphasize the potential for transformative learning to occur when students’ out-of-school lives are understood and meaningfully leveraged in school. Chapters also discuss how to foster bridges between parents and teachers, provide teachers with access to the rich cognitive and cultural resources of families, and enable all parties to begin viewing families as truly equal partners in children’s education. The book concludes with a commentary chapter that identifies necessary areas for further research.

Topics featured in this volume include:

• The contribution of racial and ethnic socialization to family-school partnerships during early childhood.
  
• Fathers and their role in family-school partnerships.
  
• The importance of Indigenous family engagement in systems of education.
  
• Home-school partnerships and mixed-status immigrant families in the United States.
  
• Family-school partnership research with the migrant and seasonal farm working community.
  
• The role of humility in working with families across international contexts.
  
• Interventions that promote home-to-school links.

Ethnocultural Diversity and the Home-to-School Link is a must-have resource for researchers, professionals, and graduate students in education, child and school psychology, educational policy and politics, family studies, developmental psychology, sociology of education, and anthropology.