I feel it is vitally important for schools, communities and parents to be involved in student achievement. However, I think it is a vastly complicated relationship that requires communication and commitment to make work. It requires new ideas and multiple approaches for parental involvement in school - what works for one parent is not going to work for another. I think, in general, schools find it easier to involve community groups in the classrooms then they do parents. Perhaps this is because community groups actively seek out ways they can involve themselves in the classroom, not because teachers are reaching out to community groups.
My fellow students have suggested ideas in former posts to improve parent involvement. One of the ideas I fully agree with is utilizing social networks. I think social networking, Facebook especially, is a great way to communicate with parents in my community. I think its crazy that this important communication tool is blocked from school networks. I work with low income adults, most of whom have children in the local school system. Not all of them have Facebook, but an overwhelmingly large percentage of them do. Some of them don't have computers, but they have access to Facebook via the library, family or friends' computers and/or smartphones - instead of buying computers, they are buying smartphones (which is strange to me, because we don't even have cell-phone coverage in most of the county!). These are the parents that do not go to parent teacher conferences and they are the parents who, in a lot of the cases, fell through the cracks and dropped out. Which typically means that their children are the ones at highest risk to drop through the cracks themselves.... and that parent and teacher communication is most critical.
All of my students want to their child to succeed - they want to help their
children with their schoolwork - but
most of them, especially the lower income and under educated ones, are
intimidated by the schools. They don't feel welcomed into the school to
volunteer. They typically had a bad experience with schooling themselves
and carry that with them. They feel intimidated by the language that
teachers use. Educators, like other professionals, have a specific
language and vocabulary that is part of their vocation. However, when
they use that language with parents, and don't stop to explain what they
are talking about, it makes the parent feel uneducated... I've had
parents tell me they felt stupid because they didn't know what IEP stood
for or what it was. One bad experience like this, especially when the
parent's first child is in elementary school, can prevent parent
participation for years.
Although my role in adult education does not mean I have to make connections with parents, it does mean I have to create and maintain relationships with community groups. When a student enters my class, the first thing we do is create a goal, and then we talk about barriers and obstacles to them meeting that goal. A lot of times those barriers are things that community groups and government resources can help meet. If a student comes to me without childcare, but needs to work on her GED, I help her find the resource to pay for the childcare while she's at school. If they are too distracted by figuring out how to afford diapers they aren't going to be able to study, so I refer them to the Family Resource Network to get diapers. Just this weekend, we hosted a volunteer literacy training to recruit and train volunteers to work with low level readers. Without community volunteers there is no way we would be able to help these individuals, because we don't have the liberty of one on one, private instruction. I am well aware, as an adult educator, the importance of community involvement to my students.
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