Philosophy is usually seen as a field that is dealt with only by experts, while it could be the activity in which everyone participates, regardless of age, culture, and socio-economic level, as it is a tool for critical thinking and reflection, a tool that reinforces foundational literacy skills. This chapter is directed toward explaining how an innovative model that enhances parents' engagement in home learning can empower their own and their children's thinking, learning, and communication skills. It is an invitation to parents to actively engage in an inclusive school community that enhances family's literacy skills. It is an attempt to enhance dialogic skills via “philosophic” Socratic dialogue with stories that prompt problematic questions of mutual interest. In the context of COVID-19 health crisis that greatly impacted parents' lives as co-educators of their children, the suggested parents' (and implicitly children) engagement model is suggested as a possible venue.
TopIntroduction: Literacy Skills And Family Involvement
The family’s instrumental role in producing literate children, neighborhoods, communities, and citizens, has been the focus of educational research for many decades. Several researchers state the necessity of family in cultivating and empowering language and the emergent literacy skills (Sastry & Pebley, 2010, UNESCO, 2008). Pedagogists from primary to higher education levels, have realized the family’s strong influence, especially for those who have limited language and literacy skills and were intrigued by the social and economic impact on the aftermath (Heath, 1983, Wasik, 2012). Mounting research resulted to policies that supported family literacy programs, with the most recent and most influential, the No Child Left Behind Act (P.L. 106-554, 2002). This Act reinforced a variety of family-focused innovative practices and interventions based on the most rigorous studies that supported family’s involvement and training with a micro impact compared to the identified needs in children’s learning at home (Van Voorhis et al., 2013, Alexander & Morgan, 2016).
Parents exercise primary influence in all aspects of a child's development and education from birth or conception even. The main source of stimuli in the period from the birth of the child to his entry into Pre-school and/or Primary School, is the family and the wider community in which the child lives and grows up. In this context the child develops several skills, such as those of phonological word processing and decoding that are not derived from direct teaching. The contribution of parents in enhancing the primary skills of reading and writing are catalytic in their course towards academic excellence. According to Morrow (2005), family literacy is reported as the ways in which parents, children and other family members use reading and writing at home. This can take place in a completely natural way during the daily activities of the family and embrace actions of both adults and children to “do different things”, including reading or telling stories, drawing sketches, writing, and sharing notes or text messages, creating shopping lists, commenting, and discussing readings of various topics, in order to communicate.
The unprecedented circumstances that the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced to the school community, is most exemplified by its extensive impact on the socio-emotional state of students, parents, and teachers. Research, such as that of Epstein (2001) and later that of Mapp & Bergman (2021), documents the importance of parents’ participation in the education of their children all the way from preschool to the end of adolescence, because of its relationship to the positive socio-emotional development and school performance of children. Discontinuities in meaning ad intent between teachers/administrators and families/communities are clearly detrimental to the development of parents-school partnerships, working relationships and/or positive attitudes about education between community and school (Cotton & Wikenlund, 1989).