From Attendance to Collaboration: Contextual Differences in Teacher Perceptions of Multilingual Family Engagement

Background/Context: There is a growing need for schools to examine the best ways of working with immigrant and multilingual families, as it is ever more likely that all teachers will work with multilingual newcomers and their children during their career. However, teachers often view multilingual families in deficit ways, and many teachers lack experience in designing culturally responsive school–family partnerships. Although professional development (PD) has been shown to positively impact teachers’ beliefs regarding actively engaging culturally and linguistically diverse families, it is not clear from the literature how such PD is taken up across different district contexts. Purpose/Objective/Research Question or Focus of Study: This article explores teachers' perceptions of multilingual family engagement across four distinct school districts involved in a PD project. We specifically asked: (1) How have teachers’ perceptions of immigrant/multilingual family engagement changed over the first year of a PD program? (2) How do teachers’ perceptions of multilingual family engagement differ across district contexts? Research Design: In this mixed-method study, we examine teacher survey responses, reflections, and researcher field notes from our first cohort of teachers (n = 25) participating in our National Professional Development (NPD) grant project. We completed descriptive statistics to address our initial research question before exploring how context could be shaping the ways teachers implemented ideas from the PD. Next, teacher reflections and researcher field notes were analyzed following an ethnographic approach. Conclusions/Recommendations: We found that power-sharing approaches to family engagement were conceptualized by teachers along a continuum of relationship-building and power-sharing across districts. While PD can support teachers to develop family engagement beyond common and traditional practices, buy-in by teachers can be limited by district context and opportunities. Researchers providing PD need to recognize that discussions around power-sharing will look different depending on district context. Furthermore, providing this type of PD will require relationship-building with districts/teachers, ongoing support, and different amounts of time specific to the context(s) they are serving.