Family and Community Literacy
Family and community literacy initiatives recognize the literacy practices that already exist among families in their homes and community settings as part of many everyday activities. Rather than privileging a narrow range of normative school-based practices associated with middle-class and white families, family and community literacy builds on the literacy skills that every person has. Family and community literacy initiatives bring people in a community together around literacy and learning.
Family and community literacy is sometimes presented as the solution for students when they struggle with reading and even as a means to address poverty. It is important to remember that literacy learning reflects the language differences, prior literacy experiences, and availability of resources at home and in community settings, which all affect how readily children adjust to school literacy practices.
Family Engagement with Literacy
Teachers can draw from a variety of practices to learn with and from families. First, teachers can take inventory of under-recognized literacy practices that inform school literacy learning and honor the experiences of families and abilities of students, such as using interviews and visiting homes either in-person or using online communication platforms to learn about texts that are important to children and their families, as well as situated within specific community contexts. Figure 1 includes possible interview questions that teachers may ask. Through interviews, teachers can learn about characters and stories told in communities throughout the world that can also be used in classrooms, particularly to support children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Figure 1 (Compton-Lilly, Lewis Ellison, & Rogers, 2019)
Because school spaces are formal and sometimes uncomfortable for students’ caregivers, home visits can be particularly helpful. Visiting homes demonstrates a teacher’s willingness to reach out to families and centers around a commitment to learning about children and their lives, and eliminates difficulties that arise when families have to consider child care and transportation. Although some educators treat home visits as opportunities to share school-approved literacy practices, ethnographic home visits enable educators to learn from families and then draw on their observations to inform classroom literacy practices (Compton-Lilly, Lewis Ellison, & Rogers, 2019). While teachers may not be able to talk with every student’s caregiver(s), even conversations with a few families provide useful information that enable teachers to craft lessons that link home and school and enhance learning for students. Such conversations will likely encourage teachers to identify multicultural, transnational, and translingual literature and specific topics that resonate with students. One way to do this is by bringing diverse texts that reflect students' identities into the classroom. By providing these books to culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms, it becomes possible for all students to access contemporary literature depicting the complex social networks and lived realities of people from different backgrounds who live in diverse communities (Vehabovic, 2021). Likewise, teachers can use these texts as mentor texts for students to create translingual writing of their own (Zapata & Laman, 2016).
Family Engagement with Literacy
In this video from the St. Louis Regional Literacy Association, Dr. Shea Kerkhoff, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Literacy at the University of Missouri - St. Louis and Michelle Franklin, M.Ed., Family and Community Outreach Support at Special School District of St. Louis County discuss family engagement with literacy.
Community Resources and Partners
Check out this Show Me Literacies Wakelet for resources on community partners. Figure 2 provides ideas on how to leverage community resources to support literacy learning.
Figure 2 (Zapata & Laman, 2016)
