Power, Culture, and Family-School Relations

Power, Culture, and Family-School Relations: Towards Culturally Sustaining Practices explores the extent to which common practices in school-based family outreach advance equity or sustain the status quo in power and cultural relations. Using a rich ethnographic account of a school-based family literacy program in Nebraska, the book unfolds the daily cultural practices of the program so that readers may visualize and contemplate how and if the program serves newcomer and refugee families within the unique context of the New Latine Diaspora. The author draws upon critical theory to showcase how neoliberal and deficit ideologies are at play throughout the different aspects of the program, the influence these ideologies have on the participants, and the tactics used by the caregivers to resist and change the programmatic structures and curriculum to meet their needs. As such, the book invites educators, administrators, and scholars into the nebulous and difficult conversation about how schools, paradoxical entities that often colonize but prospectively liberate, must not just rethink how they work with parents and caregivers but rather dismantle traditional cultural practices that seek to assimilate minoritized families. Showcasing the power of ethnography as tool which can be used to support educators and scholars to understand cultural elements of family outreach programs on a semiotic level, and how transforming these semiotic building blocks can lead to equitable relationships, it will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in adult education, social foundations of education, critical ethnography, multilingual Adult Basic Education, and family outreach.