The CRAF-E4 Family Engagement Model

Building Practitioners' Competence to Work with Diverse Families

Iheoma Iruka, Stephanie Curenton, Winnie Eke

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780124104679
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The CRAF-E4 Family Engagement Model: Building Practitioners' Competence to Work with Diverse Families lays out how mental health practitioners can best engage parents in their children's education for the child's best educational outcome. The book presents several different engagement strategies, allowing for differences in socio-political, cultural, and parental beliefs and understandings. Topics include information from early childhood, family processes, efficacy, racial socialization, and social capital.

While of interest to educators and parents, this book is written primarily for the clinician, in particular clinicians working with vulnerable child and parent populations, who may be struggling with learning or developmental disabilities.

• Concise, practical guide
• Useful to psychologists, educators, and parents

Chapter 1

CRAF-E⁴

Increasing the Capacity and Engagement of Diverse Families

This chapter describes the CRAF-E⁴ family engagement model. This model is presented as a way to increase an organization’s capacity to engage and partner with racially and ethnically diverse families.

Keywords

CRAF-E⁴; family engagement; funds of knowledge; learned helplessness

1.1 Description of the CRAF-E⁴

Our culturally responsive, antibiased framework for family engagement is called the CRAF-E⁴, the Culturally Responsive, Anti-bias Framework of Expectation, Education, Exploration, and Empowerment. This framework was designed to help early childhood practitioner’s engage with racially and ethnically diverse families in a manner that adopts the principles of cultural responsiveness and antibias. Culturally responsive, antibias family engagement incorporates the cultural knowledge, experiences, and communication styles of diverse students and their families, and it acknowledges the social injustices, inequalities, and prejudices these families face.

In our model, family engagement is defined as the “relationship” the practitioner develops with a family, a relationship that encourages, and actively invites, family members to become involved in their child’s education both inside and outside of the classroom. Family engagement is purposefully defined as a “relationship” in order to highlight the emotional underpinnings of the exchanges between teachers and family members; in addition, it is our view that it is the teacher’s responsibility to repeatedly invite and encourage families to become involved. The National Association for the Education of Young Children’s (NAEYC) Engaging Diverse Families Project (http://www.naeyc.org/familyengagement/about) explains that family engagement is based on the following principles:

Principle 1. Inviting families to participate in decision making and goal setting for their child.

Principle 2. Engaging families in two-way communication.

Principle 3. Engaging families in ways that are truly reciprocal.

Principle 4. Providing learning activities for the home and in the community.

Principle 5. Inviting families to participate in program-level decisions and wider advocacy efforts

Principle 6. Implementing a comprehensive program-level system of family engagement.

Our framework will help practitioners accomplish the 4E’s (Iruka, 2013):

• “Expect” families and students to do their best

• “Educate” families on how to support their children’s optimal development

• “Explore” ways to partner with families and value their strengths

• “Empower” families to advocate on behalf of their child’s education and well-being

Each of the 4E’s is described in the following sections.

1.2 CRAF-4^E—Implications for Practice

1.2.1 Expectation

The CRAF-E⁴ framework asks practitioners to raise their expectations of racial and ethnic minority children and families. All too often teachers, school administrators, or clinicians hold low expectations for these students and their families. Often people are not even consciously aware of these low expectations. Yet, such low expectations, regardless of whether they are explicitly stated or just implicitly acted out, have a major influence on how children feel about themselves and their performance. Educators often hold low expectations for minority families’ engagement, especially low-income parents, at least as it concerns school-based activities (e.g., class visits, volunteering, and attending parent–teacher conferences); therefore, these low expectations might serve as an emotional barrier between teachers and family members.

Low expectations have been cited as a major contributing factor to the gap found between minority children’s versus others’ achievement, because such expectations undermine children’s sense of competency and increase their sense of learned helplessness (McKown & Weinstein, 2008). Children develop a sense of learned helplessness when they repeatedly receive negative feedback or are repeatedly placed in a negative situation that is beyond their control and from which they cannot escape. Eventually, a child who experiences learned helplessness will stop trying to do better, meaning they will internalize the low expectations that people have of them.

Barriers often cited for the lack of family engagement are time, availability, stress, transportation, and child care. While real enough, these barriers are often used punitively to reinforce the expectations of limited family engagement, which in turn leads to more limited involvement. Thus, practitioners should foster a school culture in which parents are expected to be intentionally and proactively engaged in their child’s learning and school experiences. It requires, for example, that schools assess the value of having parents coming into the school for activities and exploring alternative opportunities that support social networks and leadership roles.

Opportunities for Reflection from the Field

An employer-sponsored child care program has quarterly preschool open houses in which they invite parents in to learn more about the curriculum that is being taught in the classroom. These open houses are routinely offered at 4 pm on a workday; therefore, parents must leave work early in order to attend. The teacher, Mrs. Jones, has noticed that neither Sean’s father, who is a high-level executive at the firm, never attends these open houses nor does Emily’s mother who works in the cafeteria of the company. What are some potential challenges these families might be facing that prevent them from coming to the open houses? What can Mrs. Jones do to ensure these parents get the information they need about their children’s education?

1.2.2 Education

Families are deeply knowledgeable about their children’s strengths and weaknesses, and, with the right resources and supports in place, they can meet their children’s needs. It is important that parents are educated on how to navigate the complex education institutions and system they are likely to encounter. Educating them on how to navigate these institutions will be for the benefit of their children. Parents need to learn how to advocate for such things as choosing a preschool that meets their young child’s needs to deciding whether to test their 2nd grader for gifted and talented programs to seeking additional support for children who have special needs. This skill of advocacy and education can potentially be generalizable to all aspects of their lives where they may need support.

Early childhood education programs and schools often engage in partnerships with a variety of community and local agencies that, together, can help share information, encourage and support advocacy, and promote access to resources and networks. Shared data systems, such as the Early Childhood Data system (http://www.ecedata.org/files/2013%20State%20of%20States%27%20Early%20Childhood%20Data%20Systems.pdf) and other ongoing communication can help to ensure that families seeking information and support are connected not only to appropriate services and resources but also to each other, which helps to build critically important social capital and networks. For example, if one parent is known to have skills navigating special education services on behalf of her child, teachers might introduce her to another who is seeking assistance and advice on navigating a similar system for his child.

Opportunities for Reflection from the Field

Ms. Jane, a toddler teacher from a Montessori preschool in a small rural community, has a new student who enrolls. Brandon, the new child, has special needs in that he has mild physical disabilities due to cerebral palsy. Ms. Jane has prior experience working with toddlers with disabilities because another child in the classroom also has cerebral palsy, so Brandon’s mother purposefully enrolled him with Ms. Jane. Because Brandon’s family is new to the area, his mother has been depending on Ms. Jane for lots of information about doctors and social services that are available in the community. Ms. Jane does not always know the answers to these questions, but she believes the mother of the other student with cerebral palsy might be able to help. How can Ms. Jane go about introducing the two families? How can Ms. Jane find out more information herself to pass on to Brandon’s mother?

1.2.3 Exploration

Minority families have a rich set of cultural practices and skills that need to be explored and valued when interacting with families. These cultural-based practices and skills can be referred to as “funds of knowledge (FoKs).” In the context of education, FoKs consists of resources, cultural practices, and bodies of knowledge that families manipulate to survive, make ends meet, get ahead, and/or thrive (Hogg, 2011; Moll & Greenberg, 1990). Practitioners can call upon these “FoKs” when working with families as well as students; By using FoKs practitioners will be validating families’ and students’ experiences and knowledge and using these to scaffold the work with families (Hogg, 2011, p. 667).

One can identify families’ FoKs through multiple approaches, including home visits or other opportunities that lead to conversations about and observations of families’ routines and rituals. It is critical to approach families without judgment—so that the focus of the discussion can be about the many ways in which families can support their children’s learning, success, unique talents, and contributions. To elicit the FoK of families, educators must be careful not to diminish the various activities, skills, and routines in which families engage, no matter how different they may be from their own. Educators should instead consider how what they learn may enhance their relationship with the child and family, as well as how their new knowledge could be integrated into classroom instruction, program activities, and events.

Programs should look to FoKs to unearth the skills and assets of parents and families. In addition to initial home visits, schools or centers can support targeted surveys, interviews or focus groups to help them better understand how they can build upon parents’ goals for their child’s education and to encourage and support their engagement. Programs should find ways to help parents and families meet the expectations for family engagement. Schools may find that, in order for parents to be fully engaged, they have to feel that they are making a difference in ways that make them valued partners and contributors...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. CRAF-E4: Increasing the Capacity and Engagement of Diverse Families
• Chapter 2. The Diversity of Families and Changing Demographic Trends
• Chapter 3. Providing Resources to Help Address Challenges Faced by Families
• Chapter 4. Understanding the Strengths and Resilience of Diverse Families
• Chapter 5. Examination of Teachers’ and Practitioners’ Biases
• Summary
• References