A Call from Black and Brown Mothers for True Family Engagement
Bio: We are mothers of school-aged children and a collective group of education scholars — clinical, assistant, and associate professors; research associates, and doctoral students.
Collectively Authored by: Carrie Sampson, Lok-Sze Wong, Alexandria Estrella, Dawn M Demps, & Claudia Cervantes-Soon
We are educators and researchers in one of the top-ranked education colleges in the U.S. Our scholarship focuses largely on improving educational equity. And our lived experiences as women of color and mothers with young children reflect the harsh realities of the social injustices that occur in schools and beyond.
Over the last few weeks, we struggled to write this collective piece because we are exhausted. We are working beyond our capacity to attend to our full-time jobs and our families’ needs, including the loss of loved ones to COVID-19. And we are feeling a mix of emotions toward both our children’s schools and the broader education system. We have felt anger, disappointment, fear, and hope. We have pushed through our exhaustion and emotions because we want to ensure that the voices of Black and Brown mothers and othermothers are centered in the conversations that will move us forward as we — educators, families, communities — navigate our children’s learning through this pandemic and beyond.
Our children attend traditional and charter schools in urban and suburban neighborhoods across the Phoenix metropolitan area. Arizona schools shut their doors eight weeks ago. Educators quickly developed plans for offering daily meals, technology, and online instruction that could happen in homes rather than classrooms. We applaud these efforts. And still, something major was missing. Aside from asking families if they have access to wi-fi and computers, no one from our children’s schools asked how we, as families, are managing our children’s learning at home. Nor have they asked what our most pressing concerns are during this pandemic, and then reflect on what that means for the content our kids need to learn right now.
In this major crisis, schools have literally moved into our living rooms, kitchens, and cars. And yet, we believe that many schools throughout the U.S. have missed this prime opportunity to meaningfully engage families. This is not surprising. Along with our personal experiences, plenty of research, including that recently published by Ann Ishimaru, reminds us that most schools fail to engage families as real partners in the formal education of our children, especially families of color and low-income families. Many educators assume we have nothing valuable to offer schools, seeing us as barriers to overcome or another cumbersome task on their already onerous to-do list.
The paradox of all this is that schooling can be NOTHING without families. This was true before the pandemic and is especially true now. So how do we move forward differently?
It is time for schools to put families at the center and develop, with families, particularly families of color, a curriculum that is humanizing, culturally-responsive, and revitalizing. This curriculum must be grounded in support, empathy, and love — one that views all families and children as embodying valuable knowledges, interests, and experiences.
Below we include a few recommendations on how educators might get started.
1. Meaningfully connect with students and families. We recognize that many teachers and school leaders are overwhelmed, juggling their personal and professional responsibilities in the midst of this pandemic. So throw out two weeks of assignments, and instead, like some teachers have done, focus on building relationships that matter and that can help craft a meaningful curriculum. One of our children had a virtual lunch with her former teacher and that was the highlight of her week; not the daily google classroom meetings and assignments. Connect with your students and their families in whichever way is easiest for them whether that be video meetings, Facebook, phone calls, or text messages. When this is over, families should remember the ways you reached out and showed you cared rather than the stress of helping their children connect to their online class meetings and complete assignments that feel like busy work.
2. Take advantage of this time to honor teachers as professionals by leveraging their expertise. Sadly, the obsession with standardized tests and high-stakes accountability in schools has limited our teachers’ autonomy and creative potential, boxing their teaching into prepackaged drill and kill, decontextualized lessons. Most of the curriculum we have received includes pre-packaged worksheets, videos, and activities; none of which are (or have been prior to this pandemic) culturally responsive to our Black and Brown children. How significant is learning about long division or the war of 1812 for the child who has to ride with his dad in the delivery truck all day, while he distributes groceries to our stores? With state and federal testing on pause this year, teachers have the opportunity to be creative and responsive. Three of us have benefited from creative options offered outside of our children’s schools, including a Black-centered social studies course taught by a mother in California and an environmental science class taught by an Oakland-based activist. What if we didn’t have to go beyond our children’s schools to find these options? What if our schools were responsive to our kids’ current interests?
3. Recognize that much of children’s most critical learning happens at home. The cultural strengths of families and their surrounding communities can offer important curriculum insights to educators. Solicit and take seriously families’ collective ideas, concerns, and feedback. Perhaps school and district leaders can host school and districtwide meetings with families to build community. At the very least, schools can survey their families. And while surveying is a start, educators must go beyond this to develop lasting relationships that build trust between schools and communities.
It is time for educators to radically shift their mentality about family engagement. Nobody can predict what next week will look like. But when schools and families are intimately connected, the opportunity to collectively love and support our children is ever more present.
Will we remain unchanged, insisting on detached, top-down learning in the face of human tragedy? Or will we seize this time as a unique opportunity to truly pause and reflect, to reach out to families and really get to know them, and to rethink the meaning of education so that we can co-create a new way?
