Equity has often been identified as a foundational concept for truly inclusive and reciprocal partnerships among schools, families, and communities. Equity can be difficult for schools to achieve without cultivating new paradigms for interacting with historically marginalized students, families, and communities. In order to bridge the ideal of…

Parental satisfaction is often used "as one indicator of school success or one outcome of school effectiveness". However, the notion that it is possible to gauge minoritized parental satisfaction in schools without first understanding their educational beliefs and values about education and their knowledge about the US school system is…

University education partners have great potential to facilitate schools' moving from a school led traditional approach for family involvement to an asset based, empowerment approach to partnerships. On this journey, educators grapple with the cognitive dissonance of change as they engage their emerging multilingual families in the lives of their…

Emergent Bilingual families interact with their children across their shared languages and resources, creating unique literacy activities. As a form of family engagement, teachers can observe these created literacies within Emergent Bilingual families, and attempt to transport such practices into classrooms. There is, however, a danger that the…

Schools, community organizations, and major cultural entities can address educational inequities by engaging parents and children in arts processes, projects, and performances. Three cases featuring work in the arts show promise in contributing to the positive academic and social development of learners across the socio-economic spectrum. Learning…

Family as Faculty (FAF) approaches originate from family-centered healthcare models and have been adapted in special education teacher education programs to positively influence and impact pre-service special education teachers' dispositional understandings of working and collaborating with parents/families. However, the majority of research…

In this article I introduce a framework that centers indigenous educational sovereignty in university-school partnerships. Developed from collaborative work with Indigenous Maya families who are migrants from Yucatan, Mexico, the framework operates from an understanding that Indigenous parents have knowledge that is important for their children to…

This article argues that chosen family structures are critical for LGBTQ+ youth of color. Further, it articulates the inherent sense of agency that is found in choosing a family--something that not only shapes young ways of being, knowing, and doing but impacts their ability to resist toxic cultural norms that all too often position students for…

Transformative approaches are essential for teachers, researchers, and teacher educators to rethink their identities and roles and to position themselves as both collaborators with and learners from immigrant families and communities. In this article, we share how Transformational Theory and Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) creates…

There is widespread consensus that parental involvement in their children's education contributes to the children's success at school. However, it is also recognized that non-dominant populations, particularly immigrant families, face language and cultural barriers, racism, poverty, and other obstacles to navigating school practices that many…

Digital writing is constantly in tension with the way that school recontextualizes forms of resistance and vernacular knowledge in order to sustain control and power relations across society. Yet the social practices of digital writing are diverse, wide-ranging and constantly challenge forms of authorized knowledge across a variety of different…

This article utilizes the term "digital authoring" in order to explore the ways in which children create multi-modal, digital media texts. Drawing on the notion of "emergent literacy" we share vignettes from different pedagogical and research contexts where children use media to tell stories in different forms with different…

This article uses a lens of procedural literacies to theorize youth practices of digital game-playing, modification, and creation as digital writing. The concept of procedurality describes the ways that videogames and other digital media are composed of systems of processes--computational or otherwise, which define these artifacts in form,…

In this article, we take a close look at the authoritative discourses of digital writing development communicated through the US Common Core State Standards, inclusive of its marketing materials (e.g., website, supplemental documents, and videos). Digital writing is largely missing from the CCSS and its limited inclusion is predominantly in the…

This article argues that digital writing pedagogy needs to prepare students to deal with underlying oppressive realities within the range of everyday digital writing practices as opposed to simply focusing on affordances as unfettered opportunities. In particular, digital writing is increasingly mediated through digital apps and other interactive…