Learning Together in Context: Attending to Culture in Early Childhood Family Engagement Initiatives

Abstract

Family engagement is an influential contributor to children’s success in school. Both children and families benefit, as children whose families are actively involved in their learning tend to have higher test scores and fewer reports of negative behavior; and families can better understand their child’s skills and abilities and have more positive attitudes toward their child’s school (Grant & Ray, 2016). Although schools seek to involve all families through a wide variety of school-based activities, many families, particularly families of color, are often not reached through traditional means of family engagement. When families of color and families from other marginalized groups (e.g., low-socioeconomic-status communities) are included in studies, there is some evidence to suggest that initiatives are less effective for them. Developing more culturally responsive, family-centered learning initiatives may better address families’ needs in ways that foster positive academic and social development of school-aged children. This dissertation includes two stand-alone manuscripts, both related to the design, implementation, and evaluation of culturally responsive family engagement initiatives targeting families from racially/ethnically minoritized backgrounds. The first manuscript reports on the impact of a family workshop series on African American families’ home literacy engagement, caregivers’ self-efficacy in providing literacy support, and children’s literacy gains. The workshop sessions included research-supported literacy strategies in the context of collaborative activities that built on families’ existing literacy engagement, background knowledge, and cultural experiences. I randomly assigned 90 families (94 children) to experimental and control groups. Results indicated a positive impact of the workshop series on caregivers’ self-efficacy in providing their children with reading and writing support (d = 0.37), although these findings were sensitive to data analytic decisions. In non-experimental dosage analyses, I found a positive association between attending three or more sessions and children’s academic reading attitudes (d = 0.38) and their self-efficacy in reading and writing (d = 0.69). There were no series impacts, however, on children’s literacy achievement or caregivers’ reported home literacy engagement. In the second study in this dissertation, I conducted an interpretive synthesis of family engagement initiatives developed for families of kindergarten through third-grade children from racially/ethnically minoritized backgrounds. Among peer-reviewed journal articles published between 1995 and 2017 about programs that aimed to attend to families’ cultural background (N = 21), I examined the ways in which initiatives aligned with one or more parts of Gay’s (2010) framework for culturally responsive teaching. I also synthesized the findings of a subset of the articles (N = 11) that evaluated the described programs to determine their overall effectiveness. Results suggest that although most initiatives affirmed families’ cultural heritages as valid and sought to bridge children’s home and school experiences across program dimensions, initiatives were quite varied in terms of the breadth of and depth in which families’ cultures were represented across program features, such as the program delivery and content. This dissertation addresses two common critiques of culturally responsive approaches to teaching and learning: 1) a lack of empirical evidence that demonstrates the value-added of such programs for children’s academic and social development; and 2) the often-siloed nature of educators’ application of theories of culture and learning, such as culturally responsive teaching, to practice. It contributes to the field by describing alternative and, in some cases, successful models of engagement for educators to consider when supporting children and families from specific cultural groups.