Community Dialogues
Community dialogues offer a safe space for relationship building and perspective changes around race, racism, and privilege while imparting a desire to promote change.
What It Is
Community dialogues provide a structured opportunity for individuals from varying backgrounds to come together to speak about their experiences with race and to work collaboratively toward positive change. Often facilitated by counselors and psychologists in the school setting, community dialogues encourage listening, open communication in a safe space, and relationship building. These intergroup conversations differ from other conflict-reduction practices, such as mediation and deliberation, as they acknowledge and validate multiple perspectives.¹
How It Works
When community dialogues take place in the school setting, they bring together families, educators, and community members from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Discussions, which often occur over multiple sessions, are intentionally centered on experiences related to race, racism, and identity. Goals of these dialogues include promoting listening, openness, ownership of the process, and trust, and building a shared vision and action plan for the school community.
As these dialogues are anchored in the principles of critical race theory (CRT), an understanding of five tenets from CRT should inform the implementation process:²
1. A recognition that racism is pervasive and permanent and that it intersects with other forms of oppression, such as gender and class;
2. A need to challenge notions of colorblindness and race neutrality, as they marginalize communities of color, and to develop an awareness of the effects of institutional racism;
3. A commitment to social justice as a tool for empowerment;
4. A need to validate the lived experiences of communities of color; and
5. A historical understanding when considering how to eliminate racism in education.
With these principles guiding the community dialogue process,³ participants are able to understand how race impacts teaching, learning, and the school community, and use this shared knowledge to take action.
What Changes
This work, while challenging, builds awareness on issues related to race and racism, dismantles barriers, and strengthens connections among stakeholders.⁴ Participants become aware of their own identities, of how they perceive others’ identities, and of the impact of racial micro-aggressions. In building relationships over the course of this process, the participants become a community, and together, they are able to see the barriers that impede change and are empowered to mobilize together to take action.⁵ These dialogues build stronger school-family connections and improve school climate.
Approach in Action
Tellin’ Stories
“Tellin’ Stories” is a school-based approach to family engagement developed by Teaching for Change. The approach harnesses the power of stories and dialogue to build the organizational capacity for select elementary schools in the Washington, D.C., area to strengthen their family engagement efforts and to help parents feel welcome and comfortable engaging with staff members and other families. The approach is rooted in racial equity, community organizing, family engagement research, and popular education.⁶ Schools that participate are required to hire a dedicated parent coordinator to support the work and are provided with a parent organizer. School administrators are also provided with individualized and group coaching while teachers participate in a yearlong continuing-education program that examines the effects of race and class on family engagement and school success.
Dialogues are a critical component of this work. Rather than entering schools with a fixed agenda, Tellin’ Stories starts by making connections between staff and families through sharing stories and by allowing concerns to emerge and looking for ways to address them.⁷ Dialogues focus on the diversity of the school community as a strength and focus on power and racism. The dialogues also provide insight into which of Tellin’ Stories’ signature activities will best meet the needs of the school community and most effectively support the collective goal of providing a high-quality education for all children. These signature activities range from community walks to grade-level dialogues in which teachers and parents discuss what children are currently learning and share ideas for how to promote further learning at home or in the classroom. One of the signature activities, a story quilting series, offers additional opportunities for families to connect and share their culture by telling the story of their personal quilt square to other parents.
Positive changes achieved by Tellin’ Stories include parents feeling more welcome in school buildings, school leadership gaining skills in communicating with diverse families, parents being more equipped to participate in school-based decision making, and teachers and school staff gaining knowledge on the impacts of race and class on family engagement and school success.⁸
Kindred
Kindred is a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., dedicated to changing the way school systems work by engaging families in dialogues about race.⁹ In participating schools, parents from diverse socioeconomic and racial/cultural backgrounds participate in dialogue groups. The goal of these dialogues is to help parents build trust and empathy and share experiences about racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic circumstances that shape their children’s school experiences as well as their own.¹⁰ Parents then identify an inequality that has emerged from the dialogues and take collective action to address it. For example, in one school, dialogues opened families’ eyes to the underrepresentation of certain groups within the school’s PTA. As a result, the PTA created new efforts to better reach all families.
In the first year in which the Kindred program is implemented in a school, dialogue groups are facilitated by Kindred staff. In the second year, parents who participated in year one are trained to lead the dialogues. These facilitators also meet bimonthly with Kindred staff to further develop confidence, capacity, and skills to lead ongoing equity work in their school community.
Results of an evaluation assessing the Kindred model across four schools showed that parents felt that the most valuable part of the parent dialogues was connecting with other parents, building genuine relationships, and deepening empathy.¹¹ Parent facilitators also developed confidence and opportunities to step out of their comfort zones. The evaluation also pointed to parents gaining a sense of empowerment that could increase their participation in the school community, which resulted in changes to the school environment.
As part of the Kindred process, principals must support and “buy in” and commit to the program. This act itself is a marker of organizational change, and as one principal stated, “[T]he word action implies it’s something that is seen or made, but I feel it. There is more communication coming at me from parents, and I think that alone is action.” Kindred has encouraged the principal to have better communication with parents and see parents as advisors on issues.¹²
Learn More
Endnotes
¹ Dessel, A., & Rogge, M. E. (2008). Evaluation of intergroup dialogue: A review of the empirical literature. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 26(2), 199–238. doi:10.1002/crq.230
² Cook, A. L., Shah, A., Brodsky, L., & Morizio, L. J. (2017). Strengthening school-family community engagement through community dialogues. Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 9(1), 1–29. Retrieved from https://openjournals.bsu.edu/jsacp/issue/view/jsacp_09_01
³ DePouw, C. (2018). Critical race theory and Hmong American education. Hmong Studies Journal, 19(1), 1–40. Retrieved from https://www.hmongstudiesjournal.org/
⁴ Love, B. L., & Muhammad, G. E. (2017). Critical community conversations: Cultivating the elusive dialogue about racism with parents, community members, and teachers. The Educational Forum, 81(4), 446–449. doi:10.1080/00131725.2017.1350241
⁵ Cook, A. L., Shah, A., Brodsky, L., & Morizio, L. J. (2017).
⁶ ICF International, Inc. (2017). Building connections between families and schools: A case study of the Teaching for Change family engagement approach. (W. K. Kellogg Foundation Family Case Study Series.) Fairfax, VA: Author.
⁷ Retrieved from https://www.teachingforchange.org/parent-organizing/parent-engagement
⁸ ICF International, Inc. (2017).
⁹ Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/299364441
¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² Community Science. (2018). Evaluation of the Kindred program final report. Retrieved from https://kindredcommunities.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Community-Science-Evaluation-Report-2018.pdf
