Chapter 18: Focus on Families: Strategies for Developing Preservice Teachers' Capacity for Effective Family Engagement

Educators are leaders when they champion partnerships with families that honor the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of families and communities of the students they share (Myers, 2013). Yet, over the 20 years in working with teachers in schools and now as a teacher educator, Michele has witnessed in-service and preservice teachers misinterpreting and misunderstanding the ways that families demonstrate their involvement in their child's education. Teachers, many of whom are White, middle class females, are misinformed about the multi-layered networks of support that exist in homes and communities of children from backgrounds different from their own. Because of the chasm that exists between homes and schools, there is the potential for teachers to unintentionally perpetuate the underserving of children—particularly children of color from low-income, rural communities—when they fail to engage families. In this chapter, we, as leaders in our respective university settings, use data to investigate the ways that our teacher preparation program equips preservice teachers with the knowledge and dispositions to effectively work with families from diverse ethnic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds.