What Teachers Need to Know

Topics in Diversity and Inclusion

Etherington

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498289085
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every generation has sought to make teaching and learning more inclusive and equitable, but pesky questions always remain, such as, how can teaching and learning be conducted in ways that satisfies and respects everyone? What are the parameters of an inclusive pedagogy? Who defines its principles? How should these principles be taught and by whom? And by what authority shall they be grounded? These types of thorny questions occupy the essence of educators and the authors of this book. This book is about teachers, educators, and topics related to inclusion. Teachers and educators have a lot to know, therefore the topics are broad and relevant to the times. What should teachers know about special needs, religion and spirituality, Aboriginality, the environment, tolerance, and school choice? Although teachers have knowledge of their subject matter, knowledge alone is not sufficient. They must know and understand how people learn. A teacher must also care deeply about who they teach. And this "teacher knowledge" grows and changes over time as teachers become more experienced, informed, skilled, and wiser. At the same time no teacher preparation will be sufficient because there will always be discussions that were never had and knowledge that was never shared. Time has its costs and there is only so much a formal education can prepare someone. This book helps to satisfy a cavity in learning for teachers and educators in general.

Part One

Ethics

1

Family Pedagogy: (Re)claiming a Topic of Inclusion for Teacher Education

Sherick Hughes

Introduction

Two of the most important, interdependent skills that novice teachers can learn in teacher education is (a) how to begin building upon the knowledge that diverse children bring into the classroom and (b) how to understand the role that family histories play in shaping that knowledge.1 One entry into these diverse family histories is through the examination of family pedagogy. While the actual origins of the construct, family pedagogy, in the literature are difficult to defend, the constructs of nuanced Black Family Pedagogy (n-BFP) and Oppressed Family Pedagogy (OFP) were coined by the author of this chapter.2 At the time these constructs were introduced, there was virtually nothing on the topic of family pedagogy in the discipline of education. There was, however, a plethora of research on family/parent involvement, led by pioneering scholar-activists like Dr. Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins University. Six types of family/parent involvement toward school improvement emerged from Epstein’s work: (1) establishing home environments that support learning, (2) facilitating effective communication between school and home, (3) helping the school and supporting students, (4) learning at home, (5) participating in school decision-making processes, and (6) working with other stakeholders (i.e., students, school staff, and community).3 Those six types of parent involvement were later grouped by other scholars into two categories: (1) home-based parent involvement (H-BPI) and (2) school-based parent involvement (S-BPI).4

Although, this work has been invaluable to the field of education, the work is limited in that it tends to (a) ignore the explicit critical exploration of any perceived racism among the parent(s) on socioeconomic status or race, (b) center the “parent(s)” in ways that exclude other family members involved in the children’s lives as primary caregivers, and (c) diminish a deeper, critical discussion of the pedagogical nature of school-related messages from oppressed family elders shared with children at home across generations and grade levels to improve their school experiences.5 Since its inception, family pedagogy signaled the importance of educators learning from the teaching and learning that occurs between children and their families, yet it is routinely absent from teacher education curriculum. This chapter seeks to reclaim family pedagogy as a topic of inclusion for teacher education. It is guided by one central question: why is it important to reclaim family pedagogy as a topic of inclusion for teacher education and what evidence supports this reclamation? The remaining text provides a brief review of relevant literature on family pedagogy, before describing the worked example method. A worked example of OFP is applied here (which is broad enough to encompass n-BFP and other family pedagogies) to illuminate the implications of family pedagogy. Moreover, the chapter ends with concluding thoughts on the importance of (re)claiming family pedagogy as a topic of inclusion in teacher education.

Brief Review of Relevant Literature on Family Pedagogy

There is paucity in scholarship on family pedagogy. Using the Articles+ search engine with key words “family pedagogy,” there were hundreds of hits; however, upon further inspection only ten specifically discussed family pedagogy as a construct. This scholarship included four dissertations (including the author’s dissertation), three peer-reviewed journal articles (including the author’s article), and three chapters.6 A Google search for family pedagogy revealed approximately seven pages of relevant websites; however, the vast majority of them presented overlapping information. Some new information emerged from the Google search including a relatively new journal (2011) titled Family Pedagogy (Pedagogika Rodziny), a quarterly journal of the Academy of Management. Another Google page revealed family pedagogy as an area of concentration for graduate students studying during the 2011–12 and 2012–13 academic years at Krakow: the Jesuit University of Philosophy and Education Ignatianum. The university’s faculty of pedagogy7 justify their inclusion of family pedagogy as a “specialization.” Graduates of the program are expected to reflect at least one of the following profiles:

• The graduate has acquired basic knowledge of education, history, philosophy, sociology, and psychology necessary for understanding the sociocultural context of the upbringing process and direct one’s professional development. The graduate is competent at interpersonal communication and can analyze and diagnose educational reality. The graduate speaks foreign language at B2 level according to the European Framework of Reference for Language developed by the Council of Europe. The graduate has the ability to reflect on his/her own professional role and is open to the need of professional, personal, and social advancement.

• The graduate has obtained professional qualifications for work as a primary school teacher of “Family Life Education.” The graduate is theoretically and practically prepared to work as a career educator in educational, community, therapeutic, and sociotherapy centers, in domestic violence shelters, adoption centers, educational care centers, emergency facilities, family centers, and family courts. The graduate can also work as a counsellor and consultant in institutions catering for the needs of children and families. The graduate is prepared to undertake second cycle and postgraduate studies.

Despite paucity in family pedagogy research on this specific construct, it has been described as an “upcoming discipline.”8 There is some evidence to support this claim with an international audience, including the SAGE Handbook of Educational Action Research,9 and a book published in Russia titled Special family pedagogy: Family education children developmental disabilities.10 This text interprets pedagogy as an integral approach to scholarship because it can engage actions like studying a child’s upbringing from different “specialisms” of pedagogy including “social pedagogy and family pedagogy.” Family pedagogy as a research direction and social pedagogic action answers parents’ need to be helped in better educating their children. The qualities of a “good parent” require effort and specialty training, continuous improvement and self-improvement, and are based on science, on competence and skill, and may even suppose a certain vocation.11 In another study (using approximately seventy hours of video observations collected over nine months), researchers found that the primary caregiver participates in shared book reading in ways that illustrat...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Education for All
• Part One: Ethics
• Part Two: Inclusion and Teacher Management
• Part Three: Worldview and Story