Chapter 6: Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Relationships with Families

Family engagement, understood as a partnership between schools and families to empower students' learning and healthy development, plays a critical role in a child's success in school. Families are the experts on their children's lives and their academic, social, and emotional needs. Nurturing connections between schools and families, therefore, should be a key priority in ensuring student success. In this chapter, we define the concept of culturally responsive sustaining family engagement, discuss its enabling conditions, and describe how this looks in practice.

Culturally responsive and sustaining education affirms students' cultural assets and builds equity in schools (Ishimaru & Takahashi, 2017). We understand culturally responsive and sustaining (CRS) family engagement to be a relationship between families and schools to develop programs, policies, and practices that empower students' learning (Perry & Geller, 2021). The goal of culturally responsive and sustaining family engagement is to establish an authentic relationship, where parents are viewed as the experts on their and their children's lived experiences.