Mary Knight-McKenna, associate professor of education, and Heidi Hollingsworth, assistant professor of education, co-authored an article on fostering family-teacher partnerships in early childhood education.
From the abstract: 21st century educators of young children need skills and dispositions for building partnerships with the families of all their students. Educators worldwide frequently teach children from families whose backgrounds, including socioeconomic status and home language, are different from their own. This article introduces a set of 12 principles for fostering strengths-based partnerships with families and then describes a service-learning project in two early childhood teacher education courses in which university students implemented these principles as they worked to develop partnerships with families of young dual language learners. Students’ written reflections on the service-learning project detailed their significant shifts in thinking regarding communication with families and assumptions they held about families.
Knight-McKenna, M., & Hollingsworth, H. (2016). Fostering family-teacher partnerships: Principles in practice. Childhood Education, 92(5), 383-390. doi:10.1080/00094056.2016.1226113