Focus on Parental Engagement:Lessons from the ESTEP project

Professor Alex Kendall

#ESTEP_EU

ESTEP

The ESTEP project aims to

• explore parents’ and teachers’ understandings of parental engagement and the role of social media in promoting effective practice;

• identify the conditions (attitudes, values, skills and practices) for dynamic and positive relationships between schools and parents;

• design a teacher education programme that enables teachers’ to work productively and proactively with parents in support of young people’s learning and understand the potential role of social media in their own context.

Five Country Partnership

• Austria – Ministry of Education• Bulgaria – Ministry of Education• Greece (lead partner) – Computer Technology Institute• Ireland – Universal Learning Systems (SME)• Project evaluator – Germany• UK – Birmingham City University

+ 125 Schools (25 from each country)

The UK team

ESTEP TEAM (Birmingham City University)Prof. Alex KendallDr Eleni KaniraPhil Taylor

Partner school representativesKerry Grosvenor – Chad Vale Primary SchoolAnna Cowcher – Alderman’s Green Community Primary SchoolIsla Flood & Sallie Partridge – Solihull College

Birmingham and the Black Country

• Located in the West Midlands of England

• UK’s second city• Conurbation has a population of

2.4 million• Young and ethnically diverse• Europe’s largest local education

authority• Post industrial context• Higher than average levels of

low adult skills, unemployment and work-less-ness

• Strong creative and digital economy

You might know our region for…

Overview of ESTEPESTP aims to :-

• Identify teachers’, school managers’ and parents’ needs;• Develop a training framework;• To implement the proposed training framework; • Develop a community of practice; • Pilot a set of innovative scenarios;

• To widely disseminated the project approach and outcomes to European educational and policy-making communities.

Understanding teachers needs

Each partner worked with teachers, parents and school leaders in 5 local schools• City Road Primary School, Birmingham• Chad Vale Primary School, Birmingham• Wilson Stuart Special School• Castle High School• King Edward Sixth Sixth Form College,

Stourbridge Nr Birmingham

Learning from our focus groups

• Communities

• Leadership

• Technology

• Socio-cultural issues

Communities

• Parental Engagement is highly valued by both teachers and parents and most schools are already engaging in a wide variety of PE activities

• Knowing your community is central to successful PE – one size will not fit all

Leadership

• PE should be embedded in school policy and led by the senior leadership group

• All staff within a school, regardless of role, need to be committed to and trained to engage effectively and productively with parents

• Most teachers and particularly those working in primary and special school contexts, understand PE as central to their everyday practice

Working with Social Media 1

• Face-to-face parental engagement is highly prized and represents a ‘gold standard’ for both parents and teachers

• Technology must add value rather than replace• Not all parents have access to the internet at home

and schools need to be mindful of not creating a digital divide

• Social media and ICT to support PE will be more widely used if it is accessible on portable devices, particularly mobile phones

Working with Social Media 2

• Digital literacy experience/expertise influences teachers understanding of social media and its potential use/benefits

• Parents’ digital literacy skills are key to the successful implementation of a digital PE strategy

• Teachers and parents are most likely to engage with and make use of tools that are useful and add value to their existing PE relationships

• Teachers and parents value user-friendly reliable and confidential systems

• Most teachers and parents have very little experience of collaborative PE in non face-to-face contexts

• Social media is an enhancement to skills not a replacement – will only work if good face-to-face relations are already in place

Socio-cultural issues

• Parents fluency in the dominant languages and discourses of the school are a key issue and PE strategies need to take careful account of this

• Careful evaluation of impact and evaluation is crucial to PE development

• Understanding legal and policy framework and exercising good judgement are key to successful PE

The ESTEP framework – 3 (E)STEPS to better parental engagement

ESTEP 1Exploring Parental Engagement in Context

ESTEP 2Working towards change

ESTEP 3 Impact and Evaluation

SOCIAL

MEDIA

workingwithestep.wordpress.com

ESTEP 1 : Exploring Parental Engagement in Context

Working/playing with creative methods

#ESTEP_EU

In this part of the session we will…

• Use creative methods to explore our understandings of parental engagement & our current use of social media

• Create an artifact /picture• Share our stories about parental engagement

in our own context• Generate ideas about we might use creative

methods in our own context

What will we be doing?

Creating something that helps tell a story….

#ESTEP_EU

Ethnography

"social meanings and ordinary activities" of people in "naturally occurring settings“ (Brewer, 2010:10)

•Qualitative•Subjective•Observing and noticing•Participatory•Immersion in a culture•Interviewee rather than interviewer is ‘expert’•Listening to the stories of others

So auto-ethnography…

“research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political” Carolyn Ellis (2004:14)

•Research on ourselves•We become the ‘data’ that we investigate•Connect our own lives, identities and experiences to wider conceptual frameworks and understanding

Kelly Clark-Keefe, 2008

Kelly Clark-Keefe, 2008

, I…believe that shapes, gestural lines, pictorial models, colors as well as moans, laughter, movements and the like can be critical companions to linguistic expression and productive sites for examining subjective experience. I believe this also to be true of verbal expressions realized through imagery and body-based knowing (metaphors, for example). Often, I can see it before I can say it. I can sense it before I can make sense of it linguistically. I believe this to be the case for others whose formative background experiences were mostly devoid of print material, and whose worth from childhood through adulthood was measured more by the presence of a labor-capable body than by their deftness with language. Visual art, for me, provides ground for a deconstructive process; a process of spotting binaries and moving critically through embodied as well as discourse-related meaning

(Clark-Keefe, 2008)

Bonnie Soroke’s zippers…

Un-Zipping lips: Artifacts and literacy

http://www.centreforliteracy.qc.ca/publications/lacmf/Vol18-1/LAC_18-1_Mar_2006.pdf

Her students shaped different sized zippers to portray their prior learning experiences, depicting their teachers variously as ‘hovering’,‘oppressive’, ‘insensitive’ or‘collaborative,’ and their own reactions as ‘knotted’, ‘silenced’ or ‘oppressed’. By talking about their sculptures, students are able to bring their past experiences into the classroom; they can interpret and reinterpret them in ways that help their tutor understand how these previous encounters have affected the way the students now learn….

My literacy life-world - Will

My literacy life-world - Josie

Exploring learning ‘habitus’ (identity)

Becoming an Early Years Teacher

Over to you…What is Parental Engagement like in your context?

Start your ESTEP challenge by

Sharing a ‘working definition’ of parental engagement that makes sense for your school….

Tweet a picture of your artefact and your definition using #ESTEP_EU