The Book
In this book, Professor Patricia Edwards provides teachers with strategies and examples of family involvement with literacy education that empower educators to successfully implement family involvement initiatives.

Discussion
Edwards notes that the book is designed to provide preservice and experienced teachers with a framework for actually building comprehensive programs for increasing family involvement in elementary schools. She notes that family-school partnerships can be difficult to create. She then provides strategies for developing family-school partnerships. She includes strategies that can be incorporated into preservice and inservice teacher development programs. These strategies include such things as reading autobiographies, incorporating parent involvement in field-based assignments and inservice workshops, developing family stories, and collecting parent stories of early literacy. She also examines traditional “institutionalized” methods (e.g, parent-teacher conferences, newsletters, and parent-teacher organizations), as wwell as “outside-the-box” techniques of recruiting and communicating with families (e.g., bar owners, ministerial alliance, etc.). She also provides educators with sets of action steps for improving family-school partnership preparation. The steps emphasize the procedures for effectively gathering information on the families in schools, strategies for strengthening home-school partnerships, ways of developing definitions, deciding on types of family involvement, examining perceptions, and implementing practices.

What It Means To You
Does your district invest much time and effort to engage building strong family-school relationships? How much time do your teachers spend on trying to know and understand parents and their stories? Could parents be incorporated in such things at inservice workshops?

For More Information
Edwards, P.A. (2004.) Chidlren’s Literacy Development: Making It Happen through School, Family, and Community Involvement. Boston: Pearson Education.

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