Family Engagement in Education Inclusive Approaches for Creating Collaborative and Equitable School Communities

Part 1: Foundational Understandings for Inclusive Family Engagements  1. Creating an Inclusive and Affirming School Environment for Families  2. The Psychological Dimensions of Family-Teacher Interactions  3. Culture, Identity, and Power in Family-School Relationships  4. Collaboration: The Heart of Family-Teacher Relationships  5. Stress and the Relational Work of Teaching: Understanding Families in Context  6. Building Trust Through Communication and Conflict Navigation  7. Effective Family-Teacher Team Meetings  Part 2: Stories from the Field: Possibilities for Family-Teacher Collaboration  8. Dwelling in Relation: How Family Research Transformed Our Teaching  9. Balancing Roles: A Parent’s Story of School Engagement, Advocacy, and Shared Governance  10. Centering Families, Building Bridges: Supporting Multilingual Children through School-Community Partnerships  11. Cultivating Family-Teacher Relationships Using Personal Storytelling: Transformative Curriculum Making  12. From Label to Liberation: Challenging the Misrepresentation of Black Students in Special Education  13. Partnering with Families: Communicating Effectively about Student Behavior and Academic Concerns  14. Enhancing Educator-Family Collaboration: Integrating the Johari Window and Myers-Briggs for Self-Awareness and Effective Communication  15. Building Trusting Relationships Between Families and Schools  16. Immigrant Family Stories of Navigating Public Schooling in Canada: Re-writing Asian Parent Narratives  17. Stories about Valuing Diverse Cultural, Linguistic, and Family Experiential Knowledge  18. Integrating Families into Classrooms and Schools  19. Stories about Navigating Family-Teacher Relationships  20. Building Blocks: The Importance of Educator-Family Relationships in Early Childhood Education  21. Showing Up Matters: A Learning Journey Between a Student Teacher and Teacher Educator  Part 3: Fostering Relationships with Families  22. Toward Relational Safety in Schools: Mentalization and Epistemic Trust with Families  23. Building Family-Centered Schools

Biography

Joseph Passi is an Assistant Professor of Special Education at Purdue University Northwest. Passi's research and teaching centers on inclusion, family engagement, special education law, and sociocultural understandings of disability. Before entering higher education, he taught in Chicago Public Schools for 17 years.

Paul Thayer teaches the family-centered-care courses in the Child Life & Family-Centered Care program at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. His areas of expertise include grief and loss, professional ethics, and family studies. Before joining BU Wheelock, he was a pediatric hospice director.

Janice Littlebear tutored K-8 migrant students in their Alaskan homes and taught Grades 3-8 in one of the most diverse communities in our nation for nearly two decades. Janice then worked at the University of Alaska, leading the Alaska Statewide Mentor Project in serving K-12 teachers new to the profession, helping teachers embed cultural standards and place-based strategies into everyday instruction. Dr. Littlebear continues to consult with educators about cultural pedagogy.

Michelle Parker-Katz is Clinical Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught teacher education on campus and Chicago Public School classrooms. She coordinated programs in elementary general education and special education. She also taught in the UIC Foundations of College Teaching Certificate program to help folks learn best practices for college teaching with community connections.