How Ecological Theory Plays Out in Family Involvement Programs

When teachers use strategies such as home visits, child interviews, or questionnaires, they can acquire information for six specific areas of focus within FST about how families establish and maintain:

1. Boundaries: Across families, the desired level of involvement with schools varies, as families have different ideas about the lines that should be drawn between home and school. Understanding why a family might or might not want to be involved in school activities can help teachers make decisions about how to encourage involvement.
2. Roles: Children’s behavior and interactions at school reflect what they know about and how they experience roles they inhabit at home. Children may emulate these roles at school, as helpers, caretakers, peacemakers, problem solvers, or, conversely, victims or even bullies. Teachers who work to identify positive role models among their families can offer opportunities at school where family members can apply these skills in roles that are already familiar to them.
3. Rules: Both families and programs have explicit and unspoken rules that children have to integrate. This will be harder when a rule at school is very different from one at homefor example, a child who is allowed to fight with siblings at home but clearly not with other children in the care or educational setting. When these discrepancies are identified, communications can be focused on balancing what the child understands about expectations and interactions.
4. Hierarchies: The ways families make decisions, who makes them, and who holds and wields power is greatly influenced by diversity and circumstances. Teachers learn, for example, which family member assumes responsibility as primary contact.
5. Climate: Physical and emotional environments vary widely across families and can change with circumstances, as in the loss of a job or a significant illness in the family. Teachers can convey sensitivity and respect for a family’s need for privacy or assistance when they identify and understand the stresses families experience.
6. Equilibrium: Rituals, customs, and traditions provide consistency, security, and balance. Gaining insights into the importance of these things can be helpful to a teacher for planning activities that represent the diversity among students’ families.

Involving Families at School

Family involvement models and approaches today aim to achieve what the Reggio Emilia educators call an “amiable school,” envisioning programs that welcome, incorporate, and reflect everyone’s ideasthose of children, families, teachers, and community (Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 1998; Eliason & Jenkins, 2008; Hill, Stremmel, & Fu, 2007). Teachers and families might take a grassroots approach, constructing their own vision and strategies for how to promote collaboration and involvement. Or, planning for family involvement might be done within the framework of an established model if the teacher works in a program that uses one.