I. General Information
School Name: Cayoosh Elementary School
School District: SD#74 Gold Trail
Inquiry Team Members: Keri Remple: kremple@sd74.bc.ca, Tammy Mountain: tmountain@sd74.bc.ca, Angela Stott: astott@sd74.c.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: kremple@sd74.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: Numeracy & Literacy Project
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Primary (K-3)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Language Arts – Literacy, Language Arts – Oral Language, Language Arts – Reading, Language Arts – Writing
Focus Addressed: Community-based learning, Indigenous pedagogy, Land, Nature or Place-based learning
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? Our focus was on increasing family engagement and voice in students’ literacy development.
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Scanning the school-home interactions, our team noticed that most of the communication fell into the “involvement” category instead of resembling the “engagement,” as described by ? Ferlazzo’s (2011) – who states that engagement “lead[s] with its ears – listening to what parents think, dream, and worry about… to gain partners” (p. 12). Report cards, newsletters home and learning conferences all were examples of teachers talking instead of listening. Considering the principle: Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place), as well as, Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story, we wanted to have families authentically engaged in story creation with students.
Focus: We noticed that there was a consistent pattern of families attending learning conferences, listening to their student (and teacher) and then finishing with the question: but how are they doing? Families did not feel connected to learning experiences and did not have a sense of ownership in their own child’s education.
Hunch: We believed that the school may be contributing to this dynamic by having limited opportunities for families to be deeply engaged with learning experiences; in addition, when families and teachers came together, too often the knowledge was being held by the teacher – the power dynamic was impacting the relationships between the school and the families, as well as the families and their participation in their children’s learning.
New Professional Learning: Keri Remple (team lead) is currently enrolled in UBC’s Masters of Education with a Literacy focus. Her project work has focused on exploring family engagement. These are some of the articles that have helped shaped learning during the project:
– Bartram, B. (2019). Chapter 1: Using Questionnaires. In Lambert, M. (Ed.) Practical Research Methods in Education: An Early Researcher’s Critical Guide. London: Routledge.
– Dewilde, J. (2019). Chapter 11: Ethnography. In Lambert, M. (Ed.) Practical Research Methods in Education: An Early Researcher’s Critical Guide. London: Routledge.
– Dworin, J. (2006). The family stories project: using funds of knowledge for writing. The Reading Teacher, 59(6), 510-520.
– Ferlazzo, L. (2011). Involvement or engagement? Education Leadership, 68(8), 10-14.
– Harris, P., Camaitoga, U., Brock, C., Diamond, A., McInnes, E. & Neill, B. (2021). Co-creating multilingual books with children to foster their literacies. The Reading Teacher, 75(5), 555-565.
– Kellas, J. (2005). Family ties: Communicating identity through jointly told family stories. Communication Monographs, 72(4), 365-389.
– Kim, S. & Song, K. (2019). Designing a community translanguaging space within a family literacy project. The Reading Teacher, 73(3), 267-279.
– Lambert, M. (2019). Chapter 4: Involving children. In Lambert, M. (Ed.) Practical Research Methods in Education: An Early Researcher’s Critical Guide. London: Routledge.
– Leavy, P. (2017). Research design: Quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and
community-based participatory research approaches. Guilford Publications.
– Moll, L., Amanti, C., Neff, D. & Gonzalez, N. (1992) Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132-141.
– Moody, S. & Matthews, S. (2022) Reading without words: Cultivating bi/multilingual family engagement. The Reading Teacher, 76(2), 122-130.
– Pole, K. (2015). “Why downt you riyt back to me?” Family letter writing in kindergarten. The Reading Teacher, 69(1), 119-128.
– Rowe, D. & Fain, J. (2013). The family backpack project: Responding to dual-language texts through family journals. Language Arts, 90(6), 402-416.
– Simone, J., Hauptman, A. & Hasty, M. (2019). Better together on behalf of our children. The Reading Teacher, 73(3), 281-289.
– Szech, L. (2021). How the funds of knowledge theory shifted teachers’ dominant narratives of family Involvement. School community journal, 31(1), 149-170.
– Winwood, J. (2019). Chapter 2: Using interviews. In Lambert, M. (Ed.) Practical Research Methods in Education: An Early Researcher’s Critical Guide. London: Routledge
– Wissman, K. (2020). ‘We are stories’: Centering picturebooks in the reading support class. The Reading Teacher, 74(2), 201-207.
Taking Action: Throughout the year, families came into the classroom multiple times to create a fictional story that featured their child as the protagonist. Using story studio materials, caregivers and children wove family memories, favourite foods, and meaningful places throughout their narratives – as well as several fantastical elements too (mermaids and robotic skunks to name a few). We used Zoom to meet with Indigenous artist Amanda Ned (who used to go to Cayoosh Elementary as a student!), to share details about the stories so she could create illustrations. After multiple drafts, the final stories and illustrations were published in a book that was shared at our Exhibition of Learning.
Checking: The project was a huge success in terms of family engagement (every child had a guest during family sessions – we got creative with inviting older siblings from the high school, family friends and even meeting off school grounds if needed) and built connections between the classroom and home. Along with strengthening home-school relationships, the project embedded literacy learning throughout as families wrote dialogue, similes and descriptive passages together.
Reflections/Advice: We are very interested in using the format of hosting family shared activities in other curricular areas – we are considering doing a monthly math session next year where families would start by investigating an artefact that connects to our district’s St’át’imc Scope and Sequence, asking “what math lives here?” and then playing games that support learning goals in the classroom. We are hoping to work towards a spring project where every family collects an artefact with the same guiding question.