Collaborating with the community
As parents move up the “involvement ladder,” they move beyond thinking about just their own children and becoming an advocate for them to looking at advocating for all children, including ways to improve the program, the school, or the system (see Figure 1.2).
Family-centered care and education is a giant step forward from parent involve- ment hierarchies. It involves a much larger vision of families being vital parts of their children’s care and education.
The NAEYC supports family-centered programs saying, “Young children’s learning and development are integrally connected to their families. Consequently, to support and promote children’s optimal learning and development, programs need to recognize the primacy of children’s families, establish relationships with families based on mutual trust and respect, support and involve families in their children’s educational growth, and invite families to fully participate in the program” (NAEYC, 2005, p. 11). The NAEYC also came out with a book, From Parents to Partners: Building a Family-Centered Early Childhood Program (Keyser, 2006), and instituted a proj- ect in 2007 called Strengthening Family-Teacher Partnerships, which started with several “training the trainer” institutes.
The Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) has been and is still aggressively working on linking families to their children’s educational programs. When parent involvement takes the form of family support, there is evidence that it can lower
Parenting
Communicating between home and school
Volunteering
Helping students learn at home
Decision making
Collaborating with the community
Figure 1.2 Six types of parent partnerships that lead parents to move up the involvement ladder, based on the Epstein model
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The Child in Context of Family and Community 13
stress levels in parents and make their lives easier. The HFRP website has links to areas of research and resources.
The Parent Services Project (PSP) was started in the 1980s by Ethel Seiderman in California as a mission to strengthen families by having them take leadership in assuring the well-being of children, families, and commu- nities (Lee, 2006; Lee & Seiderman, 1998). PSP now provides training, tech- nical assistance, and consultation nationally to help programs and schools engage families. Instead of merely involving families, the approach they take is to provide a wide variety of services that reflect the interests and needs of the families enrolled. Instead of predetermining what will be offered, the programs are designed to involve families in deciding, planning, and organiz- ing the activities. As a result, programs trained in the PSP approach find increased parent involvement, leadership, and participation, which strengthens community ties and leads to effective community building (Pope & Seiderman, 2001; Seiderman, 2003). The Parent Services Project website highlights the organization’s mission, values, programs, and events.
One of the goals of many programs working with parents is child abuse pre- vention. An approach to preventing child abuse is to focus on what are called “protective factors.” Examples of protective factors are: parental resilience, social connections, parenting skills, and child development knowledge. When profes- sionals identify a family at risk for child abuse, they can help most by considering, supporting, and augmenting protective factors. Professional support and help in times of need can go a long way toward lowering child abuse incidents. Early care and education professionals are a logical group for working with parents to gain positive results and lower the risk of child abuse. The delivery system comes from early care and education professionals who learn how to support parents, provide resources, and teach coping strategies that will then reduce stress and prevent child abuse.
One of the premises of all these family-centered early care and education pro- grams is that they work better when professionals understand families and involve them in respectful ways. Instead of the teacher just sharing information with fam- ilies, there is two-way information sharing. This is true for general early care and education programs and also for special education. There is some evidence that parent involvement is a critical factor in early intervention programs. The rationale is that parents spend more time with their children than early interventionists and should take an active role in the interventions, not just turn their children over to the specialists. Parents have many more opportunities to influence their children’s learning and development, and involvement in their children’s programs expands their knowledge of and skills in specific ways for their individual child (Mahoney & Wiggers, 2007; Turnbull, Turbiville, & Turnbull, 2000).
Challenges to Creating Partnerships with Families Responsiveness to families is a theme of this book. It’s hard sometimes to be respon- sive when you think you know more than the family does. Obviously professionals have funds of knowledge from their training, professional education, and experience that most families don’t have. Families also have funds of knowledge that profes- sionals don’t have (Gonzalez, Greenberg, & Velez, n.d.). It’s the professionals’ job to acknowledge that fact and to learn from parents as well as teach them. It’s more of a sharing of knowledge than it is imparting. It also requires suspending judgments
Watch this video about the Patrick O’Hearn School in Boston, Massachusetts, and how school communities change when families become involved. Does the idea of parent involvement bring up feelings of excitement or apprehension for you?
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14 CHAPTER 1
when the professional thinks families are wrong or misguided, even if research backs up the professional. Consider this quote from Asa Hilliard III (2007):
The great error in behavioral research, now acknowledged by prestigious schol- ars, is that in most cases there has been a failure to take context into account. Research tends to proceed as if constructs, methods, instruments, and interpreta- tions in culturally embedded studies are universal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most researchers are ill prepared to do research in a culturally plural environment or to deal with hegemony as it relates to culture.
Rogoff sees that the theories of development studied by teachers and human development specialists have particular ways of regarding development and goals to aim for that reflect the values of the culture of those who create the theories. Not coincidentally, those values usually relate to the developmental theorists own life. (2003, p. 18). Most human development theorists come from a strong literacy back- ground and therefore have held literacy as the hallmark of a successful outcome of development. Piaget, a scientist and thinker, saw the development of reason as the ultimate outcome of development. From these theorists’ points of view, it’s easy to see societies as primitive when they don’t hold these same values or visions.
Hilliard (2004) also has a concern about how the lens of culture is often left out of what he calls mainstream psychology. Though he’s looking at the field of psychol- ogy rather than human development, the two fields overlap in many places. Hilliard observed that mainstream psychology rarely shows any academic or scientific expertise in culture. In fact, according to Hilliard, many scholars seem to believe that cultural
diversity matters are “more political than scientific.” He went on to say that there is real resistance among many traditional psychologists to engage in the required scientific study and dialogue about these cultural matters. “Their cul- tural naiveté is almost legendary.” When one looks through a cultural lens, one sees sets of realities that are different from what has been analyzed and studied in the name of psychology and human development.