Community Engagement

For decades, schools have invited families to get involved, to volunteer, to attend conferences, and to support school events. While well-intentioned, these traditional approaches to family engagement often reinforce deficit-based assumptions, privileging dominant cultural norms and overlooking the intellectual, cultural, and social wealth that families bring to education.Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration challenges this status quo, offering a transformative vision in which families, educators, and communities become co-creators of educational systems. This collection centers equity in education by arguing that this cannot be achieved without shifting from models of parent involvement, partnership, and engagement toward authentic, collaborative practices that redistribute power and center the lived experiences of marginalized families. Drawing on research, Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration demonstrates how schools can shift from seeing families as simply clients or supporters to recognizing them as leaders, cultural brokers, and advocates for systemic change. At its heart, equitable community collaboration reimagines the relationships between schools, families, and communities. It asks educators to foster reciprocal relationships, shared leadership, and collective responsibility, where families’ voices shape decision-making and reform. Through compelling examples, ranging from Latinx families codeveloping district policies to multilingual parents co-designing curricula with educators, this collection illustrates how collaboration rooted in trust and authentic care can transform schools into sites of justice, belonging, and flourishing for all students. Each chapter of Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration weaves together scholarship, case studies, and practical tools to guide PreK–12 educators, leaders, and preservice teachers in embedding equitable collaboration into their daily practice. The book is organized into three dynamic sections: Conceptual Foundations introduces transformative frameworks for equitable collaboration, including relational power (“power with”), cultural brokering, and community cultural wealth. Taking the Next Steps offers practical strategies for building structures that sustain shared leadership, such as family advisory councils, co-designed curricula, and community-rooted partnerships. Interactive Features engages readers through reflective prompts, case studies, and curated resources that encourage self-reflection, dialogue, and application. By centering collective strengths rather than individual deficits, Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration pushes back against competitive, individualistic models of education. It calls on schools to cultivate shared advocacy, mutual accountability, and structures that honor the expertise and leadership of the families that they serve. Importantly, Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration frames this work as inherently sociopolitical, requiring schools to confront historic and current inequities, challenge hierarchies, and sustain practices that redistribute power over time. Written for educators, leaders, scholars, and community partners, Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration provides both a critical lens and a practical roadmap for building reciprocal relationships that are culturally responsive, justice-oriented, and transformative. When working together, schools, families, and communities have the power to reimagine education, not in isolation, but in collaboration. This book shows how to take that essential step. Given our space, place, and time as we emerge from a worldwide pandemic, educational inequities that were always present have surfaced and were noticed by the masses and mainstream media. Coupled with unfounded claims leading to the removal of equity and justice programming in schools, it is of the utmost importance to sustain the momentum for socially-just educational practices. The purpose of Moving From Involvement to Equitable Community Collaboration is to demystify educational trends and provide alternative transformative educational practices to enhance the work of authentic social justice education in schools. This book series of collections will juxtapose trendy educational adoptions, which can result in more unintentional harm than good, with more authentic equity and justice models that serve all students across PreK-12 schools. Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Social Justice in Education; Community Engagement; Introduction to Educating For Equity And Social Justice; Introduction to Cultivating Culturally Responsive Classrooms; Foundations Of Culturally And Linguistically Responsive Practice; Introduction to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Schools; Principles of Professional Collaboration In Education; Introduction to Supportive Classroom Communities; Introduction To School Improvement, Introduction to Teacher Leadership And School Improvement; Principles of Teaching Diverse Learners; Introduction to Multiculturalism in Education

The Little Shelter That Could: Literacy Resilience of Mothers and Children Facing Homelessness tells the story of homelessness, life in a shelter, and the impact of these factors on children’s lives and education. It is also a story of hope. Dr. Sadia Warsi discovered something remarkable during her research at Joseph's Shelter. Instead of educational disruption, she found literacy resilience. Families created sophisticated learning environments that challenged assumptions about capabilities during crisis. The Little Shelter That Could reveals extraordinary educational leadership, where children became teachers in hallway spaces and mothers transformed dormitories into literacy-rich environments. Through anonymized, reconstructed narrative case studies based on her research, this book documents how education served as both anchor during crisis and pathway to future possibilities. Rather than focusing on deficits, this work illuminates sophisticated educational knowledge families possess during vulnerable moments. Readers encounter stories of mothers who strategically selected books to accelerate their children's reading while in emergency housing, families who created "learning corners" that became the shelter's educational heart, and parents whose daily bus journeys maintained their children's school enrollment. Written for early childhood educators and teacher candidates, this book provides frameworks for recognizing family educational assets invisible to traditional assessments. Dr. Warsi challenges deficit-based approaches, offering asset-based strategies that build on what families already know. Drawing from extensive experience in special education and multicultural competency, Warsi provides trauma-informed approaches that honor family expertise while supporting growth. Twenty-five years after the initial study, these lessons remain urgently relevant, as housing instability affects an increasing number of families. The Little Shelter That Could offers hope, practical strategies, and a transformative vision for early childhood education that honors every family's educational assets.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Early Childhood Education; Family and Community Engagement in Education; Culturally Responsive Teaching; Early Childhood Literacy Development; Trauma-Informed Educational Practices; Introduction to Special Education; Assessment in Early Childhood Education; Supporting Diverse Families; Child Development and Learning; and Educational Equity and Social Justice

Hauntings, Remembering, and Aesthetics offers an intimate, artful exploration of what is lost—and what remains—when schools are closed. Grounded in the stories of two shuttered public schools in Chicago, it weaves together research, narrative, memory, and visual art to honor the communities shaped by these institutions and reckon with the systemic forces that led to their closure. Drawing from archival research, local records, personal memories, and conversations with former students, educators, and community members, the author—who has a personal connection to each school—reconstructs the histories left behind by braiding their voices with collages and photographs. The book makes visible the deep ties between school communities and the neighborhoods they served. This powerful storytelling serves as a prompt for reflection and reconsideration of school closures.The portraits that emerge tell of schools that operated under immense financial strain but built strong, nurturing environments through resourcefulness and relationships. Participants recall staff who shaped their lives, naming teachers and leaders as transformative figures in their youth. They speak openly about the racism, classism, and broken promises surrounding public education in gentrifying neighborhoods—where public housing was demolished and communities were displaced. In their words, school closures were not isolated policy decisions but outcomes of a broader inequality and disinvestment. Far from passive witnesses, these community members critically examine the past, theorizing their experiences and naming the systemic failures that framed them. They express a desire to pause, reflect, and remember—to reclaim the memory of their schools as spaces of resilience, joy, and collective resistance. As one participant shared, “There’s so much history in us.” That history, the book argues, is too often erased in mainstream narratives about school closures. By presenting these stories through both visual and literary forms, the book creates a new kind of archive—one grounded in lived experiences and presented through aesthetics. It invites educators, parents, policymakers, journalists, and anyone invested in public education to listen differently: to hear what was lost when the schools closed, and to recognize what still echoes in the voices of those who remember.This is not just a story of the past—it is a call to action in the present through stories that have always been here. These acts of remembering resist the dominant, data-driven narratives that often justify school closures. It reveals the human cost of policies disconnected from community realities and asks us to imagine more just futures for public education in our cities. This book asks us to see and hear stories anew, through the haunting beauty of memory, artwork, and collective reflection.Perfect for courses such as: Social Foundations of Education; Educational Policy Studies; History of Urban Education; Sociology of Education; Teacher Education in Urban Education; Historical and Cultural Contexts of Urban Education; Qualitative Research Methods; Arts-based Research Methods; Visual Research Methods