Teachers as Collaborative Partners: Working With Diverse Families and Communities

Teachers as Collaborative Partnersassists future and inservice teachers in developing a research-based framework for understanding the dynamics of school, family, and community relations. It provides foundational knowledge important for understanding families and communities, while exploring conditions that influence family-school-community interactions. The text is designed to engage the critical reflective capability of teachers in ways that will support their ability to work with diverse families in a variety of teaching contexts. *Part I focuses first on the social, cultural, and historical roots of the family, with specific attention to the evolution of public schools and the family as interdependent social institutions, and then on the multiple ways families conceive of and conduct family life, as well as the impact of community attributes on the work of families and schools. *Part II explores the relationship among families, communities, and schools within social, political, legal, and educational contexts. *Part III addresses educational practices that respond to authentic partnerships with families and communities. The goals of the text are supported by pedagogical tools that provide opportunities for readers to make connections between information in each chapter and realistic family-community-school situations. *Case Studiesare embedded in most chapters. These serve to complement research-based with authentic and personally articulated experiences of parents. Teachers then have the opportunity to make connections between theory and lived experiences. *Each chapter includesInquiry and Reflectionquestions andGuided Observationsto engage readers in case study analysis, situated learning exercises, and classroom and community observations and reflections. *TheFamily-Community-School Profileintroduced in this text as a teacher-generated summary allows for evaluation of family-community-school dynamics in specific contexts, and provides teacher candidates opportunities to engage in self-introspection around family-community-school issues before becoming an interacting member of a school-family community.Inquiry and Reflection and Guided Observationactivities completed throughout the text are used to generate theProfile.These exercises have been coded to align with specificProfilecomponents. TheProfile,which is also aligned withINTASC PrinciplesandNBPTS Propositions,easily becomes a portfolio section documenting teacher skills and knowledge associated with school, family, and community dynamics. Completion of the profile is described in-depth in the text. While the text is aligned with standards and field experiences that are a part of preservice teacher education programs, the content and exercises are equally helpful for inservice teachers wanting to document skills and knowledge in this area as required for National Board Certification.