Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Families Know

By Nawal Qarooni

This post was written by Nawal Qarooni, an adapted excerpt from Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Exalting Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care (Stenhouse/Routledge December 2023) by Nawal Qarooni.

Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Families Know

When I was in second grade, I used to walk home with my dad a few short blocks from Mt. Lebanon Elementary School outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I remember a chalk-pink backpack slung on one shoulder with a lined piece of paper in my hand, perforated edges ripped wrong, my head down as my father berated me for spelling babies wrong on a ten-word spelling test. This was in 1989.  

“Why would you write babbies?” he asked, shaking his head, seeming truly baffled. 

He continued: “That says bab-ees . . . and your handwriting is sloppy. Doesn’t the teacher make you rewrite this?”

Fast forward three and a half decades to 2023, and I’m walking again as an adult, now a mother of four children myself. 

My dear friend Rachel and I are bundled against the cold on the 606 trail in Chicago, large hot teas in hands, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. She hands me a belated birthday gift: an auburn knit hat with a cream-colored poof on top. 

“You know,” Rachel tells me, “I can’t get Adrian to read anything other than junk. It’s all Captain Underpants and graphic novels.” 

These vignettes aren’t a critique of my father or Rachel’s parenting, but I believe they reflect a persistent disconnect between what caregivers believe strong classroom practices look like and what we know as educators is currently more holistic practice. 

And in nearly 35 years, little has changed. In this adapted excerpt from my forthcoming book on literacy practices that elevate both home and school collective care, I share ideas for how educators might reframe our understanding of family engagement.

A Love of Words

The conversations we have with caregivers today still reflect the same biases, assumptions, and concerns that I noticed in my own parents over three decades ago, even though our teaching methods today are more powerful. Caregivers are considered anyone who cares for and shapes a child—whether that be biological parent, adopted parent, aunt, uncle, chosen family, grandparent, or otherwise. Perhaps we haven’t done a good job as educators communicating with caregivers what we know is at the heart of literacy instruction: a love of words, authentic reasons to write, idea-building above polished finals, process writing over prompts, student talk above teacher lectures, in addition to building an independent reading life founded on interest and intimacy. 

Classroom teachers today might ask students to decide on their own actions after reading, to create a visual story in response to learning, to decide what genre they want to write, to collaborate in book clubs. Teachers might ask kids to lead. If you are teaching in a workshop model, mini-lessons are likely taught whole-group, keeping direct instruction short, so the kids can think and work afterwards to grow their literacy muscles. 

And then the real work begins, with kids doing the heavy lifting by practicing genre strategies independently and in small groups while teachers confer, meeting each child in a differentiated manner to support individual growth. In a reading workshop, students might read their choice of independent book in lieu of a whole-class novel, and teachers might meet with them individually to ask questions, apply skills and strategies to that independent reading book, and practice thinking side by side (Parker 2021). 

This literacy classroom structure looks different than it did three decades ago, and even as you read this, instructional practices are continuing to evolve. But do caregivers know that? This is no different than the information you take to a new doctor who collects a history of your health and ailments. To support you and keep you healthy, it’ll take the intentional merging of your doctor’s expertise and your personal knowledge of your body and what you’ve experienced. Like doctors and their patients, sometimes a school’s expert knowledge and the wealth of information caregivers bring simply do not match. It is part of our work to ensure they do.

Perhaps the choice and autonomy in a more holistic vision of literacy instruction that is foundational in so many of our classrooms are what caregivers are ultimately confused by. We need to demystify for parents and caregivers our latest literacy practices so they can better support their children. Remembering that students spend more of their time across the year at home with caregivers than they do with us in schools, a true caregiver partnership is one of the most important pieces of the instructional puzzle facing schools today. 

Caregivers, like all of us, are deeply human. They are multilayered beings who are not all bad or all good; they are learning, making mistakes, growing, and changing over time. So, we have to remind ourselves to resist labels or assumptions about who they are or how they parent based on a small number of interactions, a single event, or a minor sample of data. Nobody should be wholly labeled for isolated occurrences. I speak from personal experience, as a mother who sometimes snaps at my children, cries when I feel overwhelmed, smiles often, and wonders constantly if I am making the right parenting choices. 

My own father is incredibly supportive but often lost his temper when I was young. Should he have been reduced to his singular parenting missteps? Never. He was unconditionally loving and faced an enormous array of challenges as an immigrant navigating life in a new country. He reflected, grew, and parented my younger siblings differently. It’s important to look at patterns and change over time. 

Engaging Families Now

Similarly, we have to recognize that every single school and community is different when it comes to experiences around family engagement (Mapp 2021). There are different communication methods, reasons for connecting, events across the school year, assemblies and volunteer efforts, and timing for parent/caregiver conferences. Underlying all that are relationships that may or may not feel respectful and positive. In 2021, when I interviewed Chicago school leaders during a parent literacy engagement pilot program for the city’s Department of Literacy, at least half of those interviewed reminded me that their students’ caregivers faced educational trauma themselves. 

And traumas such as those faced in one’s schooling, or even just a general sense of uncertainty, can manifest in a variety of mindsets families consciously or unconsciously bring with them as they engage with school systems, including:

The ways that families engage with schools are widely varied based on a variety of factors. We must eradicate judgment. Indeed, one of the most powerful comments I heard in a Los Angeles workshop I facilitated for school leaders named the realization that family engagement does not need to happen at school. Sometimes the work we do to bring families into the fold aims to further engage caregivers with their students at home and in their communities. My research and methodologies in school are a journey away from fearful, tentative, compliant, transactional, and toxic engagement toward the kind of engagement that is affirming and healthier for all families. 

Historically, gender, race, and class have impacted parental engagement with school. School is a social institution. As such, our schools share all of the shortcomings of the society in which they are situated. For instance, a society that does not fully value the contributions of women designs schools that have a difficult time ensuring that all girls thrive. A society that makes war on its poor and working-class families condones schools that punish or criminalize them.  A nation that cannot recognize the humanity of BIPOC folks is home to schools that dehumanize them. 

Parents of children from historically marginalized and underserved groups know this, and they engage with school wielding that knowing as either a weapon, shield, or disengagement tactic. And they are not wrong in this. This is historically responsive behavior. We can build school experiences for all parents that write new histories of how we can be together and flourish in school communities. Building on the research of Janet Goodall and Caroline Montgomery’s parental involvement continuum, my work with teachers adds story and nuance to the ways we collaborate and invite families into our work, making evident from our very first communication the following beliefs: 

• All caregivers add value, no matter what their life experiences are or have been.
• Teaching authentically and holistically means shunning a transactional, fear-based level of engagement.
• Meaningful connections and relationships are the only way to learn.

Caregivers might not feel comfortable coming to the school building for any number of reasons, and these can be compounded when considering the historical ways gender, race, and class have impacted parental engagement. These truths are critical to keep in mind. Maybe your school tends to bring families in when students get into trouble. Maybe your school has established and longstanding processes for bringing families into the fold in meaningful ways beyond one-off PTA events. Either way, the key to building strong, positive, and respectful relationships with caregivers is to ensure they feel their innate power and that encounters are authentic, rich and generational, with clear intentionality and invitational conversations.

Think about the most marginalized, least heard parent voices in your classroom community. Would the person feel comfortable asking questions? Would they know what to ask? How would they feel showing up for parent nights, report card pick-ups, or other events? For caregivers to feel safe in partnerships with us, we must invite each one into our collective work in intentionally welcoming ways grounded in a shared goal to grow their children as literacy learners. 

We must find shared ways to exalt all families and support all teachers. For that to happen, we weave the knowing of teachers and families together and learn evolved techniques for recognizing and communicating strong literacy ideas with every kind of caregiver, all of whom love their children, inherently want to do right by them, want to know how they can help, and, more often than not, have questions about what will ensure their children’s growth and positive development overall. 

Because there are undeniable literacy strengths in EVERY child’s home.

Paying Careful Attention

As a mother to four multiethnic children ranging in ages from four to 12, I struggle every day with the pressure of deciding what is best or right for them when it comes to learning and education. And, like most families, their father and I want to raise compassionate, critical thinkers whose curiosities are served, who will contribute to their communities, and who care about the world around them—and the people in it. As a parent, I have discovered this: kids learn when we deeply listen. Kids learn when given choice, voice, and agency. Kids learn when we pay careful attention to what they’re telling us—in every way, not just verbally. Our kids learn with strong modeling, plentiful examples, and clear demonstrations. Powerful teaching is built on this knowing, as is powerful caregiver and home engagement.

And our kids learn despite us, showing up with different home experiences that lay the foundation for who they are and how they learn. I often joke that my fourth child, Eloisa, is the most verbose and has the strongest problem-solving skills, and that it’s because we’ve largely left her to her own devices. As a baby turned toddler at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she breastfed during my Zoom calls, absorbing the conversations I had in every meeting alongside me. Her first words were, “Mama, charger,” as she teetered toward me with my laptop cord. And as the last child, Eloisa has had a very different experience than Eliana, our firstborn, whom we doted on with lessons from all kinds of baby classes. Eloisa is more verbal than them all, and it didn’t take pricey efforts. 

Crafting literacy-rich moments with our children and for all families should feel deeply-rooted and sustainable. The time we have is sacred. Our task, together, is to celebrate what already exists so that families understand their power, while also considering ways we might invite them to support their children’s literacy growth even more. We must bring additional awareness and intentionality to what families already do and have always done. 

There are opportunities to listen for, honor, connect to, and elevate family strengths while inviting them even further into our shared work and encouraging reflection around:

• recognizing the journey of process
• celebrating the role collaboration plays within the collective
• using observational literacy to read the world 
• advocating for the power of talk to grow ideas and connect with others
• giving children choice to make self-directed decisions

Traditions, Routines, and Habits

At night, when I rub Eloisa’s back to help her fall asleep, I tell her stories from my head about my cousin Sahar and me when we were very young, washing doll bums in sinks and making hideouts in the bushes in the side yard. I tell her about Uncle Jalal’s single-grain-rice-eating, sleepwalking behaviors and about Uncle Nezam getting smacked across the face at a Khoramshahr bakery, which propelled my irate grandfather to shut down the town’s single spot to buy bread for the week. Though these stories are true memories, I start with the Farsi yeki bood, yeki nabood, which is a Persian version of once upon a time. 

Our families know. I think about the medical study that proved mothers can tell their babies have fevers more accurately by hand than most thermometers; how caregivers know at school pick-up how the child’s day went with one look at body language; I think about how intimately we know our own children (Teng et al. 2008). And I think about how all of these things are part of the natural way caregivers communicate—in ritual, practice, conversation, and reflection—that are critical ingredients in literacy learning. Chicago-based author Samira Ahmed builds stories with her children when they walk to school, one starting with a line and the other adding until a full story unfolds. (Check out her kidlit Amira and Hamza book duo (2021, 2022), which exalts the ancient Shahnameh oral storytelling tradition.) My childhood friend Sarah, a psychiatrist in Pittsburgh, concocts word problems connecting stories to math about cereal box nutrition at the breakfast table. My friend Francesco regales his children with Italian humor and games. He animatedly enunciates every word, slowly enough for his English-speaking wife Katie to understand what he’s saying. And families all over the world sing nursery rhymes in different languages. 

Caregivers engage in these practices naturally. 

There are children learning language at their grandmother’s knees, getting their hair braided, listening to wisdom from the past. My friend Acasia grew up listening to her mother sing gospel at funerals, which she says shaped her own love of words, drawn out, staccato, soulful. Watching my friend Chris-Annemarie quip with her sister and mother, visiting Chicago from Boston, I recognized the innate strength in that Jamaican Patois inserted every couple of phrases: familial, identity-shaping, intimate. I observed her young children absorb their grandmother’s language lessons while they ate mango at her feet. I know how my own children join me in belting ballads sometimes broody and deep, depending on my mood; Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” (1996) and Lauren Hill’s “To Zion” (1998) are among our regulars. These rituals grow our children’s literacy lives. 

There are children everywhere who add to their full linguistic repertoires simply by being in their community, like my own son, who has been raised in so many ways on the barber shop banter where he went weekly in Humboldt Park, Chicago, with his father for a shape up; now too in Montclair, New Jersey, since we moved back East. All of these varied world languages and practices come naturally and at the same time truly elevate what we try as literacy educators to achieve: discourse, fluidity, curiosity, problem-solving, and an ability to gather knowledge and move accordingly afterwards (Herrera, España 2020).

As I reflect on all of these stories, it leads me to one conclusion: in love and chaos and everyday weirdness, families know. They know because they live lovingly. They know because they navigate chaos. They know because they make mistakes. They know because they persist by consistently learning from them. 

Families know. They have always known. We just need to listen.

Nawal Qarooni is an educator, writer, and adjunct professor who supports a holistic approach to literacy instruction and family experiences in schools across the country. Drawing on her work as an inquiry-based leader, mother, and proud daughter of immigrants, Nawal’s pedagogy centers the rich and authentic learning all families gift their children every day. Visit her online at NQCLiteracy.org, on X at @NQCLiteracy, or on Instagram and Threads at @nqarooni. You can reach her by email at nawal@nqcliteracy.com.

References

Ahmed, Samira. 2021. Amira & Hamza: The War to Save the Worlds. New York: Little Brown Books for Young Readers.

Ahmed, Samira. 2022. Amira & Hamza: The Quest for the Ring of Power. New York: Little Brown Books for Young Readers.

Braxton, Toni. 1996. “Un-Break My Heart.” Secrets. La Face Records.

España, Carla, and Luz Yadira Herrera. En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goodall, Janet, and Caroline Montgomery. 2013. “Parental Involvement to Parental Engagement: A Continuum.” Educational Review 66, no. 4 (April): 339-410. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2013.781576.

Hill, Lauryn. 1998. “To Zion.” The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Rufflehouse Records and Columbia Records. 

Mapp, Karen L., and Paul J. Kuttner. 2013. Education in A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family–School Partnerships. SEDL. Accessed May 14, 2023. PDF. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED593896.

Parker, Kimberly N. 2022. Literacy Is Liberation: Working Toward Justice Through Culturally Relevant Teaching. Washington DC: ASCD.

Teng, C. L., C.J. Ng, H. Nik-Sherina, A.H. Zailinawati, and S.F. Tong. 2008. “The accuracy of mother’s touch to detect fever in children: a systematic review.” Accessed May 26, 2023. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK75333/.

Velasquez, Elizabet. 2021. When We Make It: A Nuyorican Novel. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers.