Educational Review

Asset-based parent engagement in education: Reimagining partnerships between parents and educators

Parent engagement in children’s education is seen as crucial for the academic achievement, social wellbeing, and sense of belonging of students from early years to the end of secondary school and well into the undergraduate years. Policymakers have been encouraging parents to be engaged more in their children’s education, participate in school choice, and help increase academic achievement at the local and national levels. Prior research shows that parent engagement is not a neutral practice but is shaped by social inequality in education and society in general. As a result, the engagement practices of parents from socioeconomically, culturally, and racially dominant groups (intensive parenting, school-centric involvement including fundraising and school governance) provide better returns on investment for this group of parents. On the other hand, parents with working-class, racialised, and immigrant backgrounds, and parents of children with additional support needs are seen through a deficit lens, “hard to reach” or “uninvolved.” Parents in this group have to participate in advocacy work and show leadership to ensure that their children receive the education they deserve. Deficit approaches to parents are present in diverse education systems, although they take distinct forms based on historical, political, and cultural contexts. They are especially evident in settings where parents are seen as passive recipients of information and guidance, rather than active partners in the education of their children.

To counterbalance the widespread deficit view of parents, this special issue calls for submissions that will help to foreground an asset-based approach to parent engagement, where parents and families are seen as capable actors in children’s education, their strengths highlighted, and funds of knowledge built on to ensure inclusive and socially just education for all students.

We welcome contributions which focus on qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods research, review articles (meta-analyses and meta-syntheses), programme evaluation studies, as well as conceptual and theoretical papers that adopt a critical approach to parent engagement. We especially encourage submissions from scholars located in non-Western contexts.

Empirical and conceptual papers with a focus on asset-based approach to parent engagement globally will be welcome in such areas, but not limited to:

• Asset-based parent engagement practices
• Policy analysis that focuses on asset-based approaches to parent engagement
• Theoretical extension of asset-based parent engagement
• New avenues for research on asset-based parent engagement
• Parent engagement rooted in concepts of funds of knowledge, parent knowledge, community cultural wealth, and culturally relevant pedagogy
• Approaches to parent engagement rooted in critical theories (critical race theory, feminist theories, postcolonial and decolonial theories)
• Familycentric parent engagement
• Engaging with Indigenous parents and families
• Teacher education that fosters asset-based approach to parent engagement
• Leadership that views parents through an asset-based lens