2

F a i r D e a l i n g ( S h o r t E x c e r p t )

Reading: Ch. 7. A Principle for Reimagining our Work: Come Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends (From Teaching to Thinking: A Pedagogy for Reimagining Our Work)

Author: Pelo, Ann; Carter, Margie

Editor: N/A

Publisher: Exchange Press Publication Date: 2018 Pages: 138-152

Course: ECED 421 63A 2023W1 Supporting Young Children Through Home, School, and Community Relationships Course Code: 63A Term: 2023W1

Department: ECED

Copyright Statement of Responsibility This copy was made pursuant to the Fair Dealing Requirements for UBC Faculty and Staff, which may be found at http://copyright.ubc.ca/requirements/fair-dealing/. The copy may only be used for the purpose of research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire or parody. If the copy is used for the purpose of review, criticism or news reporting, the source and the name of the author must be mentioned. The use of this copy for any other purpose may require the permission of the copyright owner.

For more information on UBC\'s Copyright Policies, please visit UBC Copyright

Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

A Principle for Reimagining Our Work:

Come Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends Families are central characters in every child care program, but often they are two-dimensional characters. They exist primarily as adjuncts to their children: they’re the people who drop off the children, pick up the children, and manage the home front. And一they exist as irritants to educators: they don，t read our documentation, they’re late picking up their children, they send their children to child care when they’re sick, they pack unhealthy lunches, they ask us to pay unreasonable attention to their children’s sleep schedules.

These are the ways we typically talk about parents, yes? In our field, we’ve fallen into the habit of dismissing parents* concerns as exasperating distractions from the work we value: “They want us to get their children ready for school; they don’t see that play is children’s work!” We diminish parents’ humanity, we belittle their concerns in our staff room conversations, we try to “educate” them about their children’s growth.

We claim our classrooms as our turf, and we have a lot o f power there. Even in classrooms which emphasize parent engagement, as with H ead Start, the

• 138 -

Come Together with. Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

program takes the lead on fundamental planning. Program staff establish the classroom aesthetic and the rituals and the daily rhythms. Typically, teachers or administrators set the rules for behavior and the eTq^ectations for participation. They determine the curriculum, choose the books and materials, and lead the conversations. And, typically, program staff post sign-in sheets and family message boards at classroom doorways, and, so, mark the boundary between home and child care, between family life and life in early childhood centers.

In m any ways, w e’re stuck in a m odel o f relationships derived from elementary and middle school, in which roles are more tightly~- or succinctly— defined. Teachers teach, they’re the experts in education. Parents ensure their children’s attendance, stay informed about what’s happening at school, support the professionals, and do their part at home. They may even volunteer or work as aides at school— but under the direction of educators.

But we’re not teaching school. O ur arena is child care and early education, and that’s a whole different context T he people we spend our days with, most intimately, are babies and young, young children~people who have been alive on this planet for only a few years, people who are new to the world, people who deserve great tenderness and care. In our context, parents are absolutely responsible for ensuring that children are cared for according to their values and hopes, and we educators and caregivers are responsible for offering our fullest attention and mindfulness. I f we narrow the relationship between parents and educators to sharing information, we fail to acknowledge the potent and staggering honor of caring for children’s well-being that we share.

And it is a staggering honor: families entrust their children to our care often before they know us. Likely, they’ve met the director, and probably the/ve toured the center, but, if they’ve encountered us at all, it’s usually with a wave and a smile, or a quick and superficial exchange. O n their children’s first day in our care, parents leave their children with strangers, and that flies in the face of everything they’re wired to do: to keep their children safe; to know，in particular and intimate detail, about their children’s moment-to-moment lives; to play a primary role in each unfolding day and each wakeful night. Such trust, to leave their children in the care of others! Imagine the additional weight of trust that immigrant families feel，knowing that if they were swept up in an immigration raid, their children would be left with us until emergency plans could be launched.

- 139 -

From Teaching to Thinking

We should be brought to our knees with humility in the face of parents’ high trust, brought to our knees with the weight of responsibility. When we look through this lens o f humility and responsibility, we know the essential role of genuine relationships between families and early childhood educators, but, too often, we，re not looking through this lens, but through the lens o f habit and convenience, and what we see, looking through that lens, are borders between us and families.

Building Invisible Borders

We m anifest borders— in ten tionally o r no t— w hen we ask families to “volunteer3’ to do what we want them to do: to drive us around on field trips, to do the classroom’s laundry and cleaning, to build playground equipment and run bake sales.

Borders are manifest when we ask families to attend parent conferences in which we control the conversation, dispensing information about their children and asking parents to share personal information with us.

Borders are manifest when we expect families to come to family meetings whose agendas are long lists of our rules and expectations.

We inherit these borders from a m odel of school that doesn’t fit our circumstance，and we create these borders by our beliefs and attitudes.

I know. I ’m speaking from long personal experience ...

For sixteenyears3 1 worked in a fu ll-day child care center in Seattle which served

families privileged by rac% class, and education. The parents were architects and

software designers, doctors and attorneys and financial consultants. When I began

teaching at Hilltop, I fe l t “less than33 the families: I saw a great distance between

their affluent lives and my low-income，low-status identity as a child care teacher.

I fe l t awkward with them, and self-protective.

I claimed the classroom as my own. I was warm and thoughtfal in my conversations

with fam ilies and in the written documentation that I craftedfor them— and I was

• 140 *

Qome Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

clear about what I hoped the fam ilies would bring to the classroom, which wasn’t

much. I was “the educator” and they were “the parents/3 and I had the classroom

well in hand.

B ut when the children and I began to take on socialjustice activism, buildingfrom

the anti-bias goals fo r teaching and learning1, the nicely-manicured borders that Pd

constructed between myself and the fam ilies became tangled and entangling and}

soon enough, were in the way. To take up issues o f fairness and unfairness with the

children，I had to have real conversations with families, conversations that had an

edge o f vulnerability and selpdisclosure. Parents and I shared our experiences o f

injustice and privilege, we talked about our values and beliefs, about what we hoped

children would know一and not know—-about issues o f races and disability, and

militarism^ and lesbian and gay rights. A n d as we had these real conversations^ I

began to see the parents as real people》 more dynamic and multi-dimensional than

“working parents” or “affluent parents.” They became real people，with lives and

stories that reached beyond their parenting. A nd I began to offer myself as a real

person^ with a life and stories that reached beyond my teaching.

A nd the borders that I ’d so carejully tended gradually became irrelevant andfoolish.

W hen we live separated by borders，it’s easy to lose sight of the essential humanity of the people on the other side. I did that，when I reduced the parents at Hilltop to two dimensions: their role as parents and their affluence. I had to take myself in hand，set myself on a course to a new way o f seeing and being with parents. I learned from the educators at Chicago Commons, a publicly-funded program serving low-income families—a setting wildly different than the program where I worked. The educators at Commons challenged themselves to remake their image of parents living with the insecurity and viciousness of poverty and racism, seeing them, notas incapacitated by their circumstances3 butas insightful, rich in internal resources, and eloquent about their dreams for and commitments to their children. The educators at Commons taught me the necessary value of seeing families in three dimensions, with a lens that illuminated their humanity.

• 141 •

From Teaching to Thinking

Parents are too busy, we say, explaining the borders we’ve put in place. They’re stressed out, they’re crunched for time, and so we shouldn’t ask much of them, or, when we do, we shouldn’t be surprised when they disappoint us. O r we spin in a different direction: parents are over-involved，too demanding，have unrealistic

expectations for their children or for us, they’re helicopter parents t and so we should be wary of their requests, ready to fend them off. We should keep a tight rein on what we’re willing to accommodate. Or~~another storyline that we follow— parents aren’t very good at parenting: they’re inattentive, harsh with then- children, they let them eat junk food, and allow too much screen time. These simplistic caricatures of parents allow us educators to live comfortably on our side of the border, not tending particularly closely to the people on the other side.

Crossing the Border

A simple, powerful act o f curiosity can carry us across the border: who are the people who live on the other side? Border crossing begins when we consider parents，perspectives as human beings, complex and with wide-ranging lives. How would parents like us to think of them? W hat do parents want us to understand about their lives, their strengths, their longings? Several years ago, to anchor a staff conversation about our relationships with parents, I asked families at Hilltop: W hat do you want our staff to know about your life? Listen to their answers:

tfl feel some vulnerability as a parent— I see my parenting flaws and I see how skillful teachers are, and I feel self-conscious sometimes. I need teachers to create a safe climate for me.”

uWe need you to understand and support that there are many reasons that parents work and that it does not necessarily indicate less interest or concern in child rearing.”

“We are concerned about balancing our lives and our children’s lives— play/workj explore/teach, goof off/be responsible.”

• 142 *

Come Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

“My career is im portant to me and I hope I am a good role model for my kids, working in a field I ’m passionate about, doing work th a t I believe is im portant.”

I asked another question: W hat are your strengths as parents? W hat a gorgeous list they created! Compassion for children’s issues; a strong focus on children; openness, warmth, acceptance; perseverance; recognition of my shortcomings; patience and flexibility; consistency; a sense o f humor.

,• • • Borders begin to dissolve when we consciously shift our ways of thinking about parents, focusing, not on their stresses and failings, but on their strengths, the emotional and psychic resources that parents offer, their tenderness, full-heartedness, complexity.

W hether our programs serve families who grapple daily with the violence of poverty and racism or families w rapped in the comforts o f privilege，we can change ou r thinking, and see parents as strong: eager to understand, grow, discover, investigate; curious to discover both the power and fragility o f their children; powerful in their bonds with their children, which makes them active, responsible partners in the growth o f their children; eager to reflect on and rethink their experiences; and able to act on behalf of their own children and all children.

This way of understanding parents moves us from a deficit orientation to an orientation anchored by regard, and curiosity, and humility. I t carries us across the border that divides “parents” from “educators” and into the possibility for hum an relationship, person to person.

Listen to this strong offering by Paola Cagliari, a leader in the schools o f Reggio Emilia, Italy:

An essential motivation which leads each of us to communication is the perception that the other is willing to listen, is interested, respectful and acknowledges your capacities and competencies. Communicating means exposing yourself. W ho of us would choose to expose herself or himself

* 143 •

From Teaching to Thinking

in a context that is indifferent，prejudicial, unappreciative, judgmental or even hostile?

When a school denies parents the right to participation，it commits an act of violence.

If parents seem not to be interested in our program, there’s a reason, and if we believe them not to be interested, what is our reason? And what will we do? Are we prepared to have competent parents in our school? To let go of our absolute control?2

Competent parents: competent to understand the intricacies of classroom life; competent to engage in dialogue across differences; competent to challenge our teaching practices; competent to shape the culture of our child care centers; competent to share，with us, the creative work of making community.

To see parents as competent requires that we loosen our grip on our classrooms and our centers，that we step away from the belief that educators ought to have the final, determinative voice in making essential decisions about the nature and shape of life in our programs. Paola Cagliari frames the possibilities for relationships like this: “In the alliances between parents and teachers, we have the opportunity to be close to the children.”3

T hafs a powerful word, alliance. I t5s defined in Websterss dictionary as an association of groups, or people, or nations who share a common aim. It comes from the Old French word fora relative^ a kinsman a word that means unite, bind to,

Alliances: binding together as kin, sharing a common aim. Alliances don’t have boundaries; they don’t have carefiilly protected turf.

Alliances are family relationships, messy, full of surprise and delight, deeply emotional, intimate, challenging. Alliances are adventures, long and complex journeys undertaken with commitment and curiosity.

O ur alliances with families hold the promise of open-hearted relationships in which we move beyond the formal roles of “educator” and “parent” and open our lives to each other as passionate, foolish, tenderhearted people. Parents will do things that irritate us, of course; that’s the nature o f relationships, and we’ll irritate the parents right back. But we can keep our focus on building

• 144 •

alliances with parents rather than getting snared by our self-protectiveness, fear, and annoyance.

Alliances connote mutual participation, shared effort and engagement. We educators can expect to learn from families, to be changed by our relationships

families. We offer ourselves as real people to families, sharing our lives beyond our teaching. And we involve families in the work of constructing our programs.

Alliances with families create the context in which children can be best supported. Children feel securely held when key adults in their lives stand in a close and caring circle around them, and, securely held，they are easy in their lives and able to give themselves over to their emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual developmental work.

So, how do we create new possibilities for relationships with families— relationships tha t work as bridges tha t link allies, ra ther than borders tha t keep us separate?

We can begin with our language. A cornerstone role that a pedagogical leader plays in an early childhood

program is to call the community into self-examination，holding up the mirror of values and vision. She asks questions that shine bright light into shadowed corners, directing our attention at the habits we’ve formed in our conversations and our practice, habits that accrue to shape the culture o f our community. t4W ho are we as a community?” a pedagogical leader asks. “Does our way of talking about families express the vision we hold for ourselves? Does it align with the values that we seek to embody?”

At Hilltop, we used to talk about “parent participation.n We meant a passive, teacher-directed role for parents. I t was more about delegation than active, substantive, influential involvement by parents. T hen our pedagogical leader introduced us to the writing o f J im Greenman, who says: “Full partnership between a family and the child care center means tha t a family will have significant influence over their child’s experience at the center: his or her care and education. ... Partnerships are about power and shared decision-making.’’4

From participation to partnership', from borders to alliances', a change of language, suggested our pedagogical leader, could help us consider our behavior with families. How might we live into alliances^ our pedagogical leader asked. How might we share power and decision-making with parents?

£ Ofne Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

• 145 •

From Teaching to Thinking

Sharing Power

O ur pedagogical leader suggested that we turn first to our classroom environments. We asked families to bring in family photos and to create pages fora, family book, to share images and stories from their weekends. We held gatherings during which families painted tea cups for their children, or decorated pillow cases for their children’s nap pillows, or designed special treasure boxes for each child. These sorts of invitations were lovely, and warm, and heart-felt，and parents were glad to jum p in with us, to offer something o f themselves into the classroom, as a way to keep their arms around their children while they’re apart. These family artifacts were beloved by children, and were held in honor by us.

This was a good beginning. But offerings of photos, of music, o f foods that speak to families’ identities are not “sharing power，’’ are not “alliances.” The invitation to families to bring things to the classroom that make their family lives visible was important~~and wasn’t enough. It m arked the beginning of the journey toward relationship, not the end.

And so, our pedagogical leader challenged us to take up another question, one that carried us beyond environmental changes. How could we invite families into shared decision-making, into shaping the daily life and the curriculum of the classroom?

We considered w here we tended to have our m ost substantial, form al interactions with families: a t paren t conferences and family meetings. O ur pedagogical leader turned our attention to those gatherings, and asked: W hat does our approach to family meetings and parent conferences communicate about what we believe the relationship between parents and teachers ought to be?

We were unsettled by our answer. We organized our family meetings around presentations by us educators about program logistics, our expectations for families, our teaching practices and curriculum plans. They communicated that we saw parents as people who ought to follow the rules that we set about how things happened at our center.

Hand-in-hand with this approach to family meetings, we took a traditional approach to paren t conferences: one teacher, one family, a developmental assessment disguised as a lovely hand-m ade book with a personally written narrative, but still, an evaluative document. O ur conferences communicated

.1 4 6 •

Come Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

that we believed that families were passive recipients o f our expert opinions about their children.

But we said that we valued meaningful collaboration with families, and that were eager for shared reflection and meaning-making with families. We said

that we believed that learning happens in relationship. And so, we worked with our pedagogical leader to re-make our family

meetings and parent conferences to bring us into better alignment with what we valued.

Family Meetings with Relationship at the Center We looked at the long lists of logistics and classroom details that typically filled the family meetings, and worked with the pedagogical leader to gather them into an in-depth orientation package to give families when they enrolled. Now, the family meetings were wide open for us to use in service of relationships.

We decided to center our family meetings around a focused conversation about a specific question. Each classroom teaching team chose a question that genuinely interested them, an idea they were curious to explore over the course of the year with families, questions like: W hat are the rights o f children? W hat does “school readiness” mean? How do relationships become our curriculum? How might we articulate a “mission statement” for our classroom?

The teaching team prepared for the meeting by talking with the children to learn how they thought about the big question. They shared the children’s ideas with families ahead of the conference. T h e children’s insightful perspectives strongly contributed to the depth of conversation during the family meetings.

There was no big intention for a particuhr outcome or conclusion to the conversation; we imagined it as the beginning of a year-long collaboration in thinking. We did take notes during the meetings and sent those notes to families, and we created display panels that reflected the experiences we shared together during the meetings. Sometimes, there was momentum towards a more formal expression of the shared thinking at these meetings; one year, the families and educators in my classroom crafted a value statement for our year together:

We want children to feel rock-solid safe. We celebrate their uniqueness and want them to be affirmed in their individuality and encouraged to pursue

• 147 •

From Teaching to Thinking

their passions and interests and to cultivate their gifts. Hand in hand with this, we want children to experience community and relationship, to be at ease with a range of people and to deepen their compassion for others. We want there to be room for children’s emotions, for exuberant play, for conflict and collaboration, and for quiet introspection. We want the children to learn to act for fairness. We want children to see their lives reflected and affirmed in many ways, so that they develop a sense of their history as thinkers, players, and friends.

O ur family meetings included an exchange of gifts. Before the meeting, the children and educators created gifts to welcome families to the meeting and during the meeting, the parents created gifts to leave in the classroom for their children: a mural of self-portraits by the children, for example, which inspired their families to create a mural of their homes laid out along a street; close-up photos of children’s hands displayed throughout the classroom, with an invitation to families to find their children’s hands (during the meeting, we took photos of parents’ hands and added them to the bulletin boards, and, in the days that followed, invited the children to find their parents，hands).

The shift in the focus of our family meetings sparked potent transformation in the relationships among educators and families. The conversations that unfolded during the meetings were lively and immediate, unscripted and collaborative. These conversations continued through the year, as families and educators, together, continued to poke at the questions and ideas that we’d taken up during the meeting: we became thinkers together, constructing new understandings together. During the meetings, we were real with each other, and playful, and generous with our hearts. These first gatherings asked us to see each other in the fullness o f our hum an selves, and the relationships that grew from this transcended narrow “teacher-parent” dynamics.

Collaborative Conferences Working with our pedagogical leader, we also changed our parent conferences, with a commitment to share power and decision-making with competent parents. We used to do developmental assessments and meet with families to share those assessments. But we said we believed that learning happens in relationship, and

* 148 •

Come Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

that we sought to learn from and with families. So, we crafted a new approach to conferences that we called “collaborative conferences.”

At Hilltop, children came together in small groups for long-term investigations; we built our collaborative conferences around those long-term investigations, inviting parents to come together with educators to study the children’s thinking. VVe did this while an investigation was in process, not waiting until it was done to “report” on it, but jum ping in with families so that we could, together, shape the course o f the investigation.

We started a conference by taking up the big idea that the children were wrestling with in their investigation~genuinely, as adults, not role-playing or being disingenuous, but getting our minds around the work that the children were doing. Then we studied traces of children’s work―a transcription, a video clip, children’s sketches or constructions— to tease out the children’s theories and cognitive knots, places where we might lean in for deeper study. We considered each child’s contribution to the investigation, and how that reflected her or his developmental trajectory, and where she or he could benefit from m ore challenge or stretch. Together, teachers and parents planned our next offering to the children’s investigation group: families would write to the children with a provocation or with encouragement, or would leave something in the classroom for the children to encounter as part of their on-going work.

Changing the way we offered family conferences reverberated through other aspects of our relationships with families. We were learning to genuinely listen to families, in a powerful and transformative w ay ~ to listen in the way that Carla Rinaldi describes: “This courage to listen ... is to say ‘I hope to be different when I leave, not necessarily because I agree with you but because your thoughts caused m eto think differently/ ... I f you believe that others a rea source of your learning, your identity, and your knowledge, you have opened an important door to the joy of being together.”5

O ur commitment to collaborative conferences set us on a course towards living in to this no tion th a t “others are a source o f your learning, your identity, and your knowledge.” We developed new ways o f understanding what it means to be an educator, seeing ourselves, no t as experts delivering assessments, but as people thinking carefully and with no small astonishment and occasional consternation about ch ildren’s learning, and doing that

• 149 •

From Teaching to Thinking

thinking in collegial and com m itted relationships with families. We moved from talking to families about their children to thinking w ith families about teaching and learning. We moved from hoping that families would be different because of our expert offerings to hoping that we would be different because o f our collaborations with families.

Collaboration~~partnership— contains disagreement, negotiation, and compromise, for sure, and it also opens into new understandings, warm intimacy, and shared pride. It promises to disrupt our well-established routines and send us, at least temporarily, into uncomfortable disequilibrium. It requires listening with humility and courage, patience，and good humor. We have to re-think our assumptions and reconsider our teaching practices, we have to share the power and decision-making.

Making Ourselves Visible

There’s another way in which we can build alliances with families, can become “kin,” known to each other human to human. We can offer ourselves to families in real and significant ways, just as we ask families to offer themselves to us. T h e traditional practice in early education, inform ed by that misalignment with formal schooling, is a one-way intimacy: educators know a lot of personal information about families5 lives, sometimes vulnerable information: divorce, job loss, financial insecurity, illness, challenging family dynamics. But educators are known only as educators, with maybe a few carefully-revealed personal details. We can re-make that culture, so that it，s a two-way intimacy.

W hen we m eet w ith families to learn from them about their children (sometimes visiting their homes), we can ask parents what they’d like to know about us, personally as well as professionally, and we can offer personal stories, not waiting for questions. We could even invite families to visit our homes, instead o f going to their homes. T h afd sure give us a taste of the personal offering that families experience!

I was nervous when I set myself the challenge of offering myself personally: W hat would parents ask about me? Typically, they asked things like: Where did I grow up? How did I make my way to Seattle? W here else have I lived? How

• 150 -

Corne Together with Families as Collaborators, Colleagues, and Critical Friends

did I come to be a teacher? W hat bugs me about my work? I f I wasn’t a teacher, vvhat would my work be? W hat do I do on the weekends? Was I married? Did I have children? Were my parents alive? Do I have brothers or sisters? Parents asked the sorts o f questions that people might ask each other at a dinner party in the home of a mutual friend, o r at a wedding reception, those sorts o f social gatherings where some shared connection is assumed as a starting point, and where，often, lovely and genuine exchange happens, hum an to human.

In addition to these informal ways o f making ourselves visible to families, we can commit to a practice of written documentation that is hum an to human. We can move beyond checklists and learning outcomes, beyond making a report about our assessment of children’s learning, and offer stories, real stories, about children’s play. We make ourselves visible in those stories that we tell—in what we choose to tell stories about, what we see as important and intriguing and tender. We make ourselves visible with the language we use to tell those stories, and the descriptions we offer of how the children’s play touched our hearts, o r left us curious, or sparked new understandings. We make ourselves visible when we share our questions and musings about the meaning of the children’s play. O ur documentation can be a way o f being present as a full hum an being, no t just as an evaluator assessing children’s learning in a list o f benchmarks or outcomes

We can think of our documentation as a conversation rather than as a report. If our documentation is printed on paper, we can suggest that families take their children’s journals or portfolios home so that they can linger with them at times that work best for them, after the children are tucked into bed, with a cup of tea, or in the morning over coffee. I f our documentation is in digital form, we can be sure that families have a way of accessing it from home. And we can invite families to respond to what we’ve written about the children’s play and about our thinking—ask them to write about what catches their attention, what strikes them as significant, what touches them, what ideas they have for how we might extend or challenge the children’s thinking.

• • Documentation can be a dialogue, a sharing of stories and musings, an exchange among partners and allies一among people made kin by their shared commitment to children.

• 15】•

From Teaching to Thinking

We can approach our use o f social media in this way, as well, exchanging notes and photos that invite stories and insight, rather than just a quick chuckle and a “Like.”

Using the physical space of our classrooms to make families visible; changing our practices so that we share power and decision-making with families; offering ourselves as full human beings, tender-hearted and curious and uncertain and eager; engaging in conversations rather than lectures or reports: the alliances we build with families create new possibilities for deep engagement with our work, an engagement of mind, heart, and spirit.

Believing tha t parents are a source of our learning, o u r identity, our know ledge~and acting on that belief~opens “an im portant door to the joy o f being together.”6

• 152 -