Journal of Family Diversity in Education

‘You Don’t Need the Words to Be in the Book’: The Cultivation of Textual Agency during Families’ Shared Text Experiences

Kira Baker-Doyle — 2025-01-13

ABSTRACT: In recent years, there has been significant interest in designing critical, asset-based family literacy and engagement programs that transform systemic racial and economic inequities and affirm and sustain marginalized families' cultural and linguistic practices. This study draws from perspectives on culturally sustaining family literacies to examine the role that shared texts played in co-learning among families in Read Make & Play (RMP), a bilingual family literacy program in Chicago, IL. As a collaborative practitioner-researcher team, we used qualitative methods to study the experience of parents/caregivers in two cohorts from 2021-2022. Our findings suggest that families cultivated a ‘textual agency’ through adapting, re-storying, and integrating texts and materials into everyday routines and rituals, which transformed hierarchies of knowledge between each other and the texts. This study has implications for transformative family literacy and engagement work, research, and theory-building.

Seesawing (dis)connections: Digital parent involvement in a culturally diverse school community

Sue Nichols — 2025-01-13

As digitisation of home-school connectivity continues apace, nuanced understandings of the digital capabilities of parents are essential. Yet, there has been considerable homogeneity in the representations of parents, and deficit understandings of digital parental involvement with schools, especially in schools serving diverse and disadvantaged communities. The study reported here addressed these limitations of the extant research by asking how families in a case study school oriented to digital technology, how cultural and linguistic resources impacted home-school connections, and how a learning management system impacted digital inclusion in a diverse school community. Parent interviews were facilitated by interpreters, enabling participation of a culturally and linguistically diverse parent cohort. Parents’ and teachers’ diverse perspectives were analysed. Informed by Actor Network theory, connections between humans and humans, and between humans and hon-human actors (digital and material), were mapped onto a network diagram. Findings show considerable digital engagement and aspiration on the part of parents, which was frustrated by English-only communications from teachers despite Seesaw’s multilingual affordances. We report teachers’ disappointment with low parental uptake of the digital learning management system, and the deficit thinking which led them to assume a lack of digital skills or knowledge. We suggest that such deficit thinking should be challenged by a critical approach which might involve teacher-parent dialogue. Although a learning management system is a technological actor, that actor must be understood within the full context of school-home connectivity, in which schools serve communities and have a responsibility for cultural and linguistic inclusion.

Beyond “Engaged/Involved”: Latina Immigrant Mothers’ Negotiations of Family-Bilingual Program Relations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Jasmine Alvarado — 2025-01-13

U.S. educational institutions continue to frame racially minoritized families as inferior and as the causes for their children’s educational challenges based on expectations associated with white, middle- and upper-class families. Latinx families can be positioned in deficit ways even in dual language bilingual education programs (DLBE), often lauded for being culturally and linguistically expansive settings. Informed by Critical Race Theory in Education and LatCrit, this study presents counterstories of two Latina immigrant mothers supporting their children’s learning and development during the COVID-19 pandemic in states with anti-bilingual and anti-immigrant legislative histories, Arizona and Massachusetts. Leveraging community cultural wealth, the mothers shared a deep commitment to sustaining their children’s bilingual and bicultural development and wellness. Although they were positioned as engaged parents by the DLBE programs, they problematized static and constrained forms of engagement efforts during pandemic schooling and learning. As such, their counterstories trouble deficit conceptualizations and false dichotomies within family-bilingual school relations and serve as a cautionary tale for educational programs framed as supportive of linguistic and cultural pluralism. We argue for the continued interrogation of school-led forms of engagement to ensure that racially minoritized families engage in shared leadership and school governance and have their knowledge forms and language traditions elevated as crucial levers for catalyzing transformative learning in response to COVID-19 pandemic recovery efforts.

Using Queen Sugar as a Lens to Counter Hegemonic Conceptions of Black Fathers’ Involvement in P-12 Schools

Leta Hooper — 2025-01-13

The depictions of Black fathers and their relationships with their children on television sitcoms influence societal perceptions of Black fathers’ parenting practices, Black families’ configurations, and public policies on Black families. This paper sheds light on how excerpts of the show, Queen Sugar challenge narratives and images regarding Black fathers’ relationships with their children, particularly their Black sons. Revolutionary parenting and critical race media literacy are used as theoretical concepts to examine the interactions and experiences between Ralph Angel and Blue. Content analysis was employed to generate findings that examine the bond between Ralph Angel and Blue, Ralph Angel’s support for Blue’s toy choice, and his engagement in Blue’s education. Implications of this work illustrate how experiential learning activities, metacognitive activities, and popular culture sources that consider Black parents' voices and experiences with child-rearing and schools be used as an analytical and pedagogical tool in teacher education courses to counter deficit ideologies that aim to stereotype and marginalize Black parents in education settings.

The Black American Tree Project: Fostering Critical Dialogues in Communities

L. Danyetta Najoli — 2025-01-13

The Black American Tree Project (BATP) is a unique, participatory educational experience that seeks to foster understanding, respect, truth, racial healing, and reconciliation about the experience of Black Americans from pre-colonial Africa to the present day. The BAPT was developed in collaboration with Pan-African educators, artists, writers, and non-profit professionals, drawing inspiration from our collective experiences with various community organization. What follows is a first-person account of the experiences and ideas that helped shape the development of this project, an overview of the BAPT experience, and reflection on the impact and challenges of this work in local communities.