Teachers who are informed about the children, families, and communities where they teach are better prepared to share resources and advocate for gaps in literacy and other services in rural communities. Despite the importance of home-school partnerships for children's academic success, aspects of parent involvement and community engagement are often omitted from teacher preparation programs. As a result, many new teachers do not feel adequately prepared to work with families. A variety of strategies are needed for teachers to successfully engage families from diverse cultures and in communities where they teach but not live. Included in this chapter are practices that university teacher preparation programs can initiate to better train teachers to look for engagement opportunities in their school communities.
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A cloud of dust surrounds a now dirt-yellow school bus as it makes a three-point turn in a community nestled in a pocket of the county rarely seen by visitors or many locals…It's a neighborhood that several students from United Elementary School (pseudonym) call home. The dust causes a few coughs from the teachers on the bus who were taking a community mapping tour of where some of their students live and to partially experience what some of their youngest children go through as part of their regular routine before they even start their day at school (Rodriguez, 2007).
About 150 teachers piled on buses Friday to take a unique tour, the first of its kind in this local school district. The group took a tour of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in [the northern part of the] county, the places where their students live. “I want students to know that we care about them and we love them and we’re always going to be here for them,” said high school teacher Kimberly (pseudonym). “We have them for such a short time every day that we don’t realize that some of them go back to homes with no electricity, no running water,” said the principal (
Billow, 2016
.)
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.