Home-School Pathways: Exploring Opportunities for Teacher and Parent Connections

Introduction

These excerpts from regional news stories highlighted two public school principals’ attempts to acquaint teachers with the rural communities of their students. Rather than using the days prior to school opening, routinely called “teacher prep days,” going over the year-long calendar and reviewing policies and other organizational tasks, these school leaders chose to organize a visit to the children’s neighborhoods for teachers and staff. By riding several bus routes, pointing out what families lived at the addresses, how the neighborhoods were organized, the length of time for children on the bus, and connecting in what classrooms siblings, extended family members and neighbors would enter only a few days later, teachers got a glimpse of the children’s lives outside the classroom. Once back at the school, the principals led discussions on what they had collectively learned and what individual teachers, administrators and staff members might use to better meet the needs of individual children in their classes. It is important to acknowledge that the discussion could have taken a voyeuristic, deficit approach, focusing on the lack of means and the poverty of the area from a negative outsider’s stance. Instead, the principal leaders encouraged the conversations to describe the positive aspects witnessed. This included how families’ homes shared backyards, how toys and play equipment were visible, and that children were seen outdoors on bikes and swings. Teachers seemed impressed by what they called the evidence of industriousness, as they commented on the vegetable gardens and flowering pots visible in small yards and spaces while others noticed the backyard shops and home goods advertised for sale. Others commented on the neatness of the yards and homes, although many of the children lived in lower socio-economic neighborhoods and subsidized housing developments, a fact which seemed to surprise some teachers. One teacher pointed out the benefits of a mobile home park near a large poultry and hog production facility, where many of the children’s parents and extended family members worked. Here children had connections to extended family, school age neighbors and friends of multiple ages and gender. The bus rides, emphasized as a first step in situating the homes and neighborhoods of the children in context of the school community, helped to open a preliminary window into the children’s world not typically seen from school gates.