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Promoting Meaningful School-Home Partnerships for Multilingual Families at the Secondary Level Through Culturally Responsive Practices
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2025-08
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There exists a breadth of research establishing the positive associations between family engagement in their children’s education and student achievement. These positive associations hold true for English language learners (ELLs) and their families, whose unique cultural and linguistic identities are often not taken into account by educators when designing family engagement opportunities. In fact, several barriers exist that prevent families of ELLs from establishing meaningful school-home partnerships, including language and communication barriers, cultural misunderstandings, emotional strain, lack of educator awareness that manifests in deficit thinking, and district-level limitations. Access to meaningful family engagement becomes even more limited as students enter secondary levels of education, as the change in setting and parent-child relationships affect what modes of engagement are available and appropriate. Teachers have an obligation to all students and families – including ELLs – to provide a high-quality educational experience, including accessible opportunities for developing meaningful school-home partnerships. This paper describes culturally responsive approaches for establishing such partnerships for families of ELLs, using Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and a funds of knowledge framework. To address the issue of lack of teacher awareness of strategies for developing meaningful school-home partnerships for ELLs – specifically at the secondary level – this capstone project proposes a professional development (PD) program based on dedication, collaboration, and application, to encourage educators at a public New York middle school to reflect upon and adjust their family engagement practices to better support ELLs.