Better Is Better: Describing Family-Centrism, How Inquiry and Co-Construction as a Counter-Story Raises the Bar in Family–School Partnerships

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that what is sometimes at fault for the poor attendance and lack of engagement in schools observed from historically marginalized families is a missed opportunity to increase understanding or cultural relevance on the part of schools. In this paper, we use the construct of “counter stories” which has the potential to change the script on the instrumentalist demands of quantity versus quality in parent engagement. By providing examples of what we consider “quality” engagement techniques via the staff’s interpretation of their roles within one demographically rich early learning center, the strategies used to engage parents are documented. Counter-stories of practice show family-centrism as interpreted by school leaders. By describing one community context and its practices of building relationships with newcomer families, relationally driven parent engagement techniques are revealed. The authors highlight how inquiry-based methods surpass the generic approaches described in policy. When parent engagement “arises” from within parents’ motivations and informs authentic knowing (by teachers and school leaders), community systems are elevated. Professionals’ decisions about children and community groups that are informed by families’ knowledge are consequently meaningful and authentic.

1. Inquiry Driven and Emergent Parent Engagement

In this paper, our purpose is to share a description of an early education setting serving toddlers, preschoolers and kindergarteners, and families in which community-centric parent/family engagement techniques were utilized. We document, via an observational and focus group study, how school leaders, teachers, and family support workers created mechanisms to “elevate” the status of parents’ knowledge in this school. Parent/family engagement strategies were emergent (inquiry-driven), because they went beyond the routinized types of efforts that teachers and school leaders commonly take, driven by questions asked within the community and requiring teacher reflection, staff questioning, and co-constructed actions within a community to co-construct success in parent engagement (Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Kroeger, 2015; Sisson et al., 2022, 2024). The context is described using examples of parent/family engagement established by staff but notably occurring at junctures in children’s development or family experiences, when parents would most notice the schools’ efforts to understand them fully. The practices described in the paper are counter-stories to generic descriptions of parent–school involvement.

Parent engagement can be defined in at least two ways but has been described as part of a continuum (Goodall & Montgomery, 2013). Parent engagement can denote specific skills of relationality that parents demonstrate within the parent–child bond. This is often invisible to teachers but falls under parenting, such as actions motivating children in at-home learning, monitoring their development and well-being, or creating rules and discipline (Carvalheiro et al., 2023; Epstein, 1995). Parent engagement can also denote how parent’s skills help them to interact with school settings, leading to their active involvement within institutional processes, such as receiving and responding to invitations and communications from school staff, or reviewing and supporting a child’s academic growth through being a part of school activities and the social community of schooling (Carvalheiro et al., 2023; Epstein, 1995). In this paper, the authors describe aspects of the second end of the continuum: what parents “do” with institutional settings. We like Goodall (2022) and Goodall and Montgomery’s (2013) perspective, which suggests that parent engagement is activated via parents’ own agency and is “a process involving a set of relationships and actions that cut across individuals, circumstances, and events that are produced and bounded by the contexts in which that engagement takes place” (Goodall, 2022, p. 82).

While we mostly agree that parent engagement comes from the parent (as agency), a good many things that teachers (or schools) do to invite parents to become engaged in the school culture are worth noting (Fenton et al., 2017; Liang et al., 2020; Mapp & Kuttner, 2013). This paper builds on this further, detailing how settings such as the Lillian De Lissa Center enable parent engagement via subtle forms of institutional address and invitation to vulnerable parents (with teachers or school structures initiating the engagement), setting the stage for parent-centrism (Buchanan & Buchanan, 2017; Goodall, 2022).

Elsewhere, researchers have argued that the social complexity of working with families is constrained by experiences of systemic racism, dominant language practices, and often classism, with the unrecognized biases of school staff coloring families’ or teachers’ perceptions, which may leave families feeling unwelcome (Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Kroeger et al., 2019; Souto-Manning & Swick, 2006; Tobin et al., 2013). This is not a new idea; Pushor (2015) speaks of the power of schools’ efforts to understand families from indigenous cultures and religiously diverse communities as “walking alongside”, arguing that school experiences are often disengaging because they fail to build the very relationships they seek (Pushor, 2013). To circumvent disengagement, Sisson et al. (2024), describe the practices of early childhood centers where school leadership is co-constructed with Aboriginal families, including families’ contributions in the staffs’ professional learning about the community, in which educators’ active listening to families interests and needs led to changes in how and what the schools taught. Studies show that “valuing families funds of knowledge” has the capacity to significantly contribute to school leadership, with schools developing in socially congruent ways to communities (Vélez-Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992; Moll & González, 1994; Sisson, 2024, p. 811). Isik-Ercan (2018) writes about the power and complexity of honoring the input of immigrant and refugee parents, describing how the silences and emotional reserve around refugee mothers’ engagement in schools signals the ways in which powerful resettlement trauma and psychological distress influence newcomer engagement. Isik-Ercan (2018) highlights the value of intentional, directional effort(s), which are required by schools serving refugees.

We hope that readers understand our message in this paper: to be responsive towards parents (and elevate parents’ voices regarding their children’s experiences), teachers must perfect their skills in learning from families, managing their own impressions while considering new perspectives. Often, teachers become closer to parents in situ as a kind of relational emergence that comes along with inquiry, leading to a co-constructed parent engagement (Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Sisson et al., 2022). Fenton et al. (2017) pointed out that when African American parents have a more active voice regarding what happens with their children, reversing the microaggressions inadvertently created in traditional practices (like IEP development), pedagogic stances of responsiveness can achieve a shift to utilize the expertise(s) of families.

Inquiry-based techniques offer emerging opportunities in situ that can garner parent input and inform curriculum or classroom management, with the potential to update and make personal the ways parents are routinely asked to engage in school culture (Pushor, 2013; Kirmaci, 2019b; Kroeger et al., 2019; Kroeger, 2015; Sisson et al., 2024). Shifting the power differentials between parents and school staff via inquiry can lead to a type of responsive, relational practice, with outcomes such as reciprocity, co-constructed parent engagement, and a school experience which might include a responsive curriculum and new understandings of families (on the part of teachers) (Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017; Shaw & Morgan, 2019). Such approaches can eliminate deficit assumptions, replacing them with factual knowledge and a strategy for understanding students more fully (Edwards et al., 1999; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Schecter, 2002; Sisson et al., 2024, 2025).

School people have an important job in establishing parent engagement, because they must establish routines, make inquiries, and tailor their own responsiveness to individuals without overburdening parents. They also must recognize the critical role they can play in shifting the unbalanced dynamics of institutional privilege, and often class privilege, in school directives, which might serve to re-instantiate traditional power dynamics in school–family involvement (Fenton et al., 2017; Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Kroeger & Mendez Bray, 2014; Lareau, 1989).

Most home–school community-engagement policies in international contexts are driven by instrumentalist assumptions that strive for more opportunities for parent engagement without first noticing the underlying locus of power in common parent-involvement strategies. School-centric activities include such things as coaching parents on homework, asking parents to work on skills at home, sharing students’ assessments related to schooling, developing education plans (i.e., IEPs), or educating (informing) parents about the curriculum (Fenton et al., 2017; Kirmaci, 2019b). School-centric methods for engaging parents in schools proscribe such things as conference attendance, communicating and volunteering, and/or even home visits. Attracting more people to an event is one of the many markers of success in a school-centric approach. School-centric approaches can inadvertently hinge upon an assumption of the unlimited availability of parents, especially women, to invest time in schooling (Landeros, 2011). However, school-centric efforts can, at times, fail to provide opportunities for parents to feel valued or noticed by teachers as unique individuals with lessons to give (Pushor, 2013, 2015). This might be due to time constraints or to the sheer number of individuals school staff are obligated to engage. But what most dominant models do not do well is teach teachers (who are mostly of European decent and upwardly striving in terms of social class) how to understand the gaps, misinterpretations, and latent meanings that parents and their children experience in relation to schooling and their subjective experiences from within and outside of access to the dominant society’s privileges (Fenton et al., 2017; Shaw & Morgan, 2019; Kroeger, 2015; Kroeger & Mendez Bray, 2014; Sisson, 2024; Sisson et al., 2025; Soutullo et al., 2016). Novice teachers and experienced teachers almost always draw from what has commonly been done, which can even be shaped by their own school experience and, unfortunately, these simple practices are often created (even implicitly or unintentionally) to be assimilationist, driven by the market demands of schooling, (i.e., high-achievers in school will be employable in the future) (Kirmaci, 2019a). A worldwide interest in improving school–family interactions is needed, but better resources regarding the strategies for facilitating these partnerships continue to be necessary as communities become more divergent, affected by global economies and changing politics (Olson et al., 2007; Olson et al., 2006; Kirmaci, 2019a; Nieto, 2013). School-centrism often leaves teachers with the impression that “if (so and so) would do (x) at home, things would be better for (child) at school.”

A diverging argument (beyond school-centrism) situates parents as the primary drivers of their children’s early learning and attempts to shift the locus of power in parent-engagement experiences from generic, school-driven routines to models of practice in which families’ know-how, stories about the child’s upbringing, parents’ hopes and dreams, and cultural knowledge are central to early learning and the curriculum, (Edwards et al., 1999; Fenton et al., 2017; Kroeger & Mendez Bray, 2014; Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Kroeger et al., 2019; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Schecter, 2002; Pushor, 2013; Stroetinga et al., 2018; Sisson et al., 2022, 2025). In family-centric approaches, inquiry-based techniques are used by professionals in their decision-making, which can elevate teachers’ relational knowledge, increasing the clout of individual or whole groups of parents such as indigenous/aboriginal, low-income workers and communities of color (Shaw & Morgan, 2019; Kroeger, 2015; Sisson et al., 2025). Relational knowledge (a term coined for this paper) is built while developing personal relationships with parents and children and is necessary to learn how (or drive) parents motives to participate in events or school experiences. Relational knowledge is created by a teacher (or school) as a form of active labor that can connect individual children’s and family’s lives to the life of the school in a more personal, co-constructed way (Sisson, 2024; Sisson et al., 2025; Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017).

Relational knowledge, as defined here is, a difficult-to-study aspect of a teacher’s skills set, created in context and often driven by the values, beliefs, or actions held by practitioners working with families (Shaw & Morgan, 2019; Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017). Relational knowledge can be created via a school’s philosophy of engaging families via practices, which can allow for teachers to disrupt their own faulty mental models of expectation that contradict the parents’ actual lived experience (Ishimaru, 2014; Kroeger & Lash, 2011). The mental models of parent engagement that teachers sometimes hold (commonly called cultural models) have roots in the dominant ways in which mainstream middle-class parents behave in relation to education (Carvalheiro et al., 2023; Harkness & Super, 1996; Kroeger, 2005; Lareau, 2018); these are often unconsciously held by school staff, and originate in the idealized versions of parenting structured by social class and gender (Brantlinger & Jabbari, 1998; Landeros, 2011; Lareau, 1989, 2018). Approaches to inquiry that relate to the relational knowledge that teachers develop when building authentic relationships can shift a teacher’s mental model of families, helping them to understand children, allowing them to bracket faulty assumptions, and ultimate allow teachers to be receivers of information; this more nuanced understandings might lead to authentic school experiences via relationships (Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Sisson et al., 2022, 2024). Inquiry approaches, as defined here, are built upon learning new things about the student and their families in context, to solve problems or create openings, which allow parental presence and increase the educational setting’s effectiveness (Kroeger, 2015; Sisson, 2024; Sisson et al., 2025).

With relational knowledge, family-centric approaches require different types of organizational structures, created by school staff, establishing opportunities for parents to be valued and valuable within children’s educational lives via deep listening, which elevates the cultural or historic presence of people within a community (Ishimaru, 2014; Miller Marsh & Zhulamanova, 2017; Sisson, 2024; Sisson et al., 2025). In a recent review of the literature on teacher’s experiences with families, teacher’s learning in working with families was the most common topic (Kirmaci, 2019b); however, initiating dialogue, adopting families’ insights, and even noticing differences in the values of teachers and parents regarding children’s upbringing are understudied aspects of teacher development (Stroetinga et al., 2018). Studies of whole organizations (like school districts or individual schools) attempting to shift parent-engagement paradigms to meet the needs of low-income families or language-learners can interrupt school-centric scripts by building trust differently, yet these approaches require more teacher–parent interaction (Ishimaru, 2014). The techniques used by teachers to build relational knowledge are likely understudied because intensive descriptive research about effective practice is laborious, underfunded, and less easy to capture in research accounts than the large-scale numerical studies upon which policy work is based.

Inquiry approaches can help teachers to tailor their actions because when what they know is factual, nuanced, and personal, a relational intention (on the part of the school or teacher) is conveyed. Information gained from families can be used to support professionals as they solve classroom or school problems—making schools better places to be. Moreover, teachers build rapport, setting the stage to understand their students and improve their approaches when responding to students. Openings are provided by the teacher or the school, tapping into parent’s knowhow and shifting parent involvement to become a parent-centric endeavor. When teachers can tap into parents’ motives, they are more likely to develop the capacity to further their own professional skills while building responsiveness to or within the community overall. In other words, inquiry and co-constructed approaches drive family-centrism, building trust and rapport, allowing for further parent buy-in and school know-how, further shaping parents’ views of themselves as valued members of the community.

2. Conceptual Tools for Framing Family-Centrism

Counter-story is a research technique that is aligned with Critical Race Theory (Crenshaw, 1991; Hooks, 1992) and used to provide survival and liberation opportunities for oppressed groups, helping researchers to overcome deficits in existing research methods. Intersectionality, a closely related concept (noting that everyone has a race, gender, sexuality, language, etc.), allows professionals to help categorize and discern how hierarchical systems of power and constraint are operating as ever-shifting interconnections of relations in schools, often experienced in hierarchical, contrastive ways for individuals of differing identities (Crenshaw et al., 1991; Hooks, 1992). Intersectionality, as applied in this paper, can help school personnel (or readers) recognize or rethink their own motives in action by providing a conceptual tool to interrogate their own social positioning, which enables school personnel to rethink their interactions and build an understanding between themselves and others. Lastly, intersectionality can allow people to more carefully notice their own marginalizing actions in routine family-engagement events (Crenshaw et al., 1991; Kroeger & Mendez Bray, 2014; Kroeger et al., 2019; Sisson, 2024). Schools inherently perpetuate structural forms of racism, classism, linguistic standardization, and power, but interrogating forms of parent engagement (via deconstruction) shows us the ways in which school-centrism is inadvertently assimilationist, as we notice how individual bodies are empowered or disempowered differently by various institutionalized practices (Kroeger & Mendez Bray, 2014; Kroeger et al., 2019; Lawrence & Hylton, 2022). Intersectionality is used within the counter-stories framework for this paper to describe the practices at the de Lissa Center.

Cultural capital, as a construct, has long been applied to middle-class and professional families’ engagement actions (Lareau, 1989; Yosso, 2005). However, in 2005, Yosso (2005) rekindled Gramsci’s notion of social capital (applied to how the ruling class maintains itself via social networks and relations), reinterpreting and applying it anew to an understanding of community wealth in families of color. Yosso notes the many ways in which communities of color contain strengths, which might go unrecognized by schools, and her ideas are useful to conceptualize how resources are present in immigrant and newcomer families as they enact social striving (via schooling) on behalf of themselves and their children.

In the sections that follow, we illustrate family-centrism in action via the actions of the staff at the Lillian de Lissa Center Belgravia in Birmingham England. Using counter-stories as the method (Delgado, 1989, 2023; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), we show how relational intention in parent engagement is established, setting the stage for parent involvement. The Center is an early childhood setting, serving mainstream working-class families, low-income families, and international refugee and immigrant newcomers, some seeking asylum within a working-class neighborhood, in the U.K. The Center’s rituals regarding parent engagement, along with its strong curriculum, set the stage for effective family-driven support for education. In the Lillian de Lissa Center, parents, some simply by virtue of their identities, might have been framed as having a “deficits” by teachers and family care workers due to their persistent poverty and lack of dominant language capacities, or because of their racial, ethnic, religious minority, and cultural status differences as new arrivals in a new country. However, at the de Lissa Center, the cultural capital which is evident in many Eurocentric forms of middle- and professional-class parent engagement (Lareau, 1989) was transformed (by school staff) into openings to allow community wealth, in the forms of aspirational, familial, social, linguistic, and navigational capital (Yosso, 2005), to situate the engagement roles that parents played.

In the sections that follow, we show how school leaders, teachers, and family support workers created mechanisms to “elevate” the status of parents’ knowledge in parent engagement practices. By bringing out community members’ knowledge as a form of cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), school-centrism was shifted in tangible ways to favor parent-centrism. The examples shown via description and photographic evidence demonstrate simple and effective ways in which family-centrism is possible in everyday practice.

Approaches which are family-centric, as described in this paper, have lasting power to elevate teachers’ knowledge and serve as reminders that school routines around parent engagement are not written in stone and individual centers and practitioners have the power to shape the interactions between themselves and parents/families in their communities by acting as learners (co-constructors), even in mundane encounters.

3. Observation and Focus Group Methods

Author 1 learned about the de Lissa Center’s creative and emergent curriculum, along with mother-care and pre- and post-natal social systems. The family engagement techniques became visible across two site visits over a course of two years. Author 1 noted the setting’s innovations in parent engagement during an extensive tour provided by then-director, Jane Froggatt, now retired. Although the arts-based, Reggio-Inspired integrated curriculum, which included forest study (including overnight farm trips), proved insightful, it was the connections created with newly arrived immigrant parents (especially asylum-seekers) that were most noteworthy to the researchers.

A first visit to learn about the site was spent touring the center, collecting written documents, and taking still photos of materials and spaces, all while getting an intensive look at the Center’s philosophy, documents, and spatial and material arrangements. A history of the school’s pedagogic approaches was shared via the director (whose real name is used with permission) and a second visit lasting two full days was planned.

For the second visit to the site (approved by the human subjects review board at our university) focus group interviews with staff, school and home observations, photos, and the collection of documents were created. Upon the second visit, nine teachers at the center and two-family support workers who were part of focus groups provided access to observe the school and home practices more deeply. Separate teacher and support staff focus groups (lasting approximately 2 h each), as well as classroom observations and one home visit, were conducted. Kroeger accompanied one parent-support staff worker on a home visit with an asylum-seeking, newly arrived mother (whose verbal and written permission for the researcher’s presence was given). Through focus groups and the home visit, we came to understand the specialness of the staffing, the center organization, and the creative use of family support workers.

In this paper, visual artifacts, descriptive accounts of center documents, and what was learned from the Lillian de Lissa Center staff and then director Jane Froggatt, were analyzed for coherence regarding the family/parent engagement techniques. When Kroeger was able to accompany a family support worker on a 45 min home visit with the permission of one young refugee mother, she learned how the home visit processes were central to parent engagement.

Family-centric practices at the de Lissa Center are described next in this paper, gleaned through rereading transcripts and listening to staff reflections. Insights from the director, teachers, and family support workers were gained from watching and listening, as well as in reflection on the short conversations and focus groups. The observation of spaces, for example, is described here within an account of how the Center utilizes parent engagement techniques. The analysis of the material for this write-up comprised wholistic impressions, informed by photographs, focus group conversations, and written documents, which led to the findings described in this article. Artifacts (such as family handbooks and the school’s rituals of creating a yearly family album) were shared with me during each visit to the Center, serving as descriptive examples of how parent-centrism was established and maintained.

Describing the actions and techniques of personnel can reveal the special strategies staff use in their attempt to create a nuanced understanding of families which are critically informed by their relationships, socio-cultural knowledge, and attempts at representation (Fenton et al., 2017). Featured here are some of the actions of the school that elevated the school personnel’s use of parents’ knowledge and power; these underpin their parent-centric approaches. We further consider how approaches such as these allow for professionals to leverage the cultural wealth, navigational, or linguistic capital from within families, using parent knowledge to understand parents and improve engagement encounters.

When focusing on the intersectionality of families and staff, the de Lissa Center strategically approached parent engagement through elevating community wealth (Yosso, 2005). The staff created techniques which allowed the center to establish institutional intent with families at the onset, setting a direction for learning and allowing teachers, family support workers, and staff to build upon aspects of parent knowledge, which created openings for parents to detail their children’s needs or family/parent’s desires regarding learning.

4. Describing the Lillian de Lissa Center’s Family-Centric Approaches

During focus groups and interviews, the staff described the children and families at Lillian de Lissa Center1 as a mix of United Kingdom-born and foreign-born newcomer families, with over 50% of the children coming from poverty and about 25% representing languages and cultures other than English. The de Lissa center has been named as a Beacon award-winner school for its excellence in creativity and is named after Lillian de Lissa (a key Australian/British scholar), who led The Gypsy Hill College of Education in Kingston, Surrey, England, during the early progressive era and into the 20th Century (Jones, 1975/2011; Whitehead, 2009, 2010).

At the time of the visits, over twenty staff, including six family support workers, and eighty young children between the ages of three and five, attended the Center. The de Lissa Center is in a bustling part of Birmingham, England, with traffic, noise, busy streets, commercial enterprises, and numerous tall apartment complexes (some of which are new-settlement housing units for asylum-seekers.) The families and parents at the school, as described by staff, come from a wide variety of economic and cultural backgrounds; although over half of the children do speak English as their dominant language, others speak multiple other languages, with many children having little or no English when they first arrive at school at the age of three or four. The Center’s Director, Jane Froggatt, and her staff were keenly aware of the difficulties posed by the high-density housing, busy roads, and poor play facilities in the immediate vicinity of these homes, as well as the uncertainty and unemployment of new arrivals from many locations around the globe.

Focusing on orchestrating belonging among families, children, and staff, the teachers and family care workers demonstrated knowledge of the complexity of daily life and the legitimacy of parent’s needs. Family-centrism entailed adaptation and adjustment for the populations in the neighborhood surrounding the center: the value of “social cohesion within society” is stated in the Center’s Handbook. The de Lissa Center advertises itself to families as a multi-cultural environment, with an ethos of recognizing and valuing what each child brings to the nursery. A striking feature of the school, according to the school handbook, entitled A Celebration: Creative Childhoods, is its long history of adapting to and addressing diversity in their student and family community.

The staff and teachers at de Lissa engaged in community-building via family-centric pedagogic approaches, communicating ideas about children’s competence and acting through a supportive complex of relationships and action. Displays such as the handbook highlighted parents’ cultural and linguistic capital as an asset to be integrated into the school to enrich the community overall. In the sections that follow, examples of the Center’s family-centrism in action show its commitment and desire to integrate diversity in the community while maintaining excellence in the experience it offers to young children.

4.1. Demonstrating Intercultural Competence via Visual Climate and Family Support Workers as Staff

Family-centrism in schools often starts with visual communication(s) to families through environmental print. At the de Lissa Center, symbolic forms of inclusion were apparent via environmental, written linguistic aspects of the setting (Figure 1).

After a prominent welcoming sign written in English (Figure 1), the visual environment created by family support workers (staff members beyond teachers at the Center) effectively reflected the cultural diversity of the multi-national families represented in the de Lissa community. The rich demographic in the neighborhoods around the school was present in the visual appearance of the entryway to the center. A welcoming foyer with a staff greeter conveyed to all parents, but especially immigrant parents, a warm welcome, with signage including the Arabic, Bengali, Turkish, French, Punjabi, Urdu, Chinese, Somali, Gujarati, Portuguese, and Spanish, languages, which represented only some of the linguistic and cultural texts of the children’s family lives.

As a staffing priority, the school employed family support workers, who were carefully selected based upon the influx of new immigrants. Family support workers’ photographs, names, and linguistic or national expertise were placed on signage near the entrance to the center and in family gathering areas (Figure 2). About 25% of the children at the center spoke minority languages and the family support workers, according to Froggatt, spoke many of the languages represented in immigrant homes. Family support workers, according to Jane Froggatt, had “deeper knowledges” of Afro-Caucasian, African Somali, Afghani, Pakistani, Chinese, Korean, Turkish and various Indian groups, with each care worker specializing in a cluster of geographically or linguistically related global, national, or regional culture(s). Nine of the fifteen to twenty language groups present in the school were either spoken or understood by the family support workers, who were assisted by the linguistic capital of the parents (Yosso, 2005). Because the de Lissa Center is located very near to a large transitional housing complex (with separate provisions for women and children, larger families, and single men) the family care workers’ role in linking parents to educational, health, social, and economic support is paramount.

The Center was described by Froggatt as a school that was “moving toward intercultural competence” in its core provisions to parents (Olson et al., 2006, 2007). In addition to family care workers, the school handbook contained print in multiple languages, demonstrating its commitment to diversity. In one example of the literature the Center offers to parents–a small guidebook with instructions for enrolling and getting started in the school—the images told visual stories (an example of what parent engagement might look like), with photos illustrating parents, children, and teachers participating in school activities together. The guidebook used photographic visual text, which encouraged parents to take an active interest in school activities. Creating a welcoming school handbook and welcoming enrollment materials using imagery allowed teachers and family support staff to convey a “sense of working closely” with families while reducing the written linguistic load in paperwork for parents (who might not speak English), and conveyed a warm, family-centric intent.

Actions taken by staff included the creation of visual signifiers beyond the handbook and parent enrollment materials, with greeting signs and images represented on walls, entryways, and shelves throughout the center. Diverse languages highlighted the symbolic presence of many home languages, taking advantage of parents’ linguistic capital.

4.2. Wellbeing and Employment Opportunity as a Family Resource

In addition to visual signifiers in many languages on family care worker’s introduction signs (Figure 2), the Center (a large building with open, connected classrooms) contained resources in print for take-home reading to support families’ wellbeing. Behind a Center greeter (who would utilize a telephone system to connect families with support workers or teachers), large display shelves housed pamphlets and free books related to health, parenting, and education (Figure 3). Services were provided by regional health support and mental health systems.

Another well-organized, wall-sized bulletin board advertised available employment opportunities in the region, ranging from semi-skilled to skilled labor and professional labor opportunities (Figure 4). Because the local and regional job postings were displayed along with a variety of helpful information to families about young children, parenting, and contemporary issues (in congruence with the economic and social life of parents and families of all walks of life), parents would likely feel a strong sense of welcome and assurance of their future stability (as well as their own potential employment opportunities) from the environment. Wellbeing as a wholistic construct affecting the child and the family was conveyed via visual materials with resources in visual and spoken languages.

In classrooms, teachers proudly explained how their use of children’s literature (Figure 5) reflected their families, with the prints in the environment (like labels on classroom materials) being selectively chosen depending upon who attended their classrooms. An example, beyond the visible bulletin boards, signs, and literature in the Center, was the labels on material bins, which were printed in Arabic and Bengali (in one classroom) and Turkish and Urdu (in another); the teachers proudly explained, “families had been involved by helping to create”. Between two classrooms in which Arabic-speaking children were present, a display of children’s books featuring Muslim children’s books figured prominently.

5. Parent Centrism via Community Services, Center Meetings, and Home Visits

5.1. Prenatal and Well-Baby Checks

The de Lissa Center contained preschool services, with nine to ten well-equipped classrooms, and a large, fenced playground with trees in the middle of a busy urban center, but materials noted to parents that community services could also provide professional advice and referrals to more specialized services within the region. As an example of their commitment to child and parent well-being (parent-centrism), the Center staff had created a small medical room in conjunction with local hospitals to facilitate a weekly obstetrician (or midwife) visit (Figure 6).

Noting that obtaining medical support in a new country could be intimidating for newcomer families, the visiting medical personnel conducted prenatal physicals for pregnant mothers and conducted well-baby checks one day per week. The medical room was always open and available on-site for new parents to visit or schedule their pregnancy exams. The Center director noted that many mothers became comfortable with the Center either before the birth of their child or after, which helped ease the process of school entry for preschoolers. Medical personnel conducted well-baby checks in the parents’ first language, with the local hospital supporting medical translations, and Froggatt was proud to report that many mothers who came to the Center for maternity check-ups “often signed their children up” for preschool education at the very same time because the Center was “well known and highly valued” within the local community.

5.2. Engagement Offerings–Parent-Driven

Parent offerings in evening or afternoon workshops were created at the parents’ request. The director Jane Froggett was proud to describe that teachers and the school were not the generators of the topics discussed in meetings and workshops with parents; instead, groups were “arranged and scheduled at parents’ request”, with staff “overseeing and finding speakers or community experts” from other agencies. Experts were sought through teachers and the director’s professional networks after parents requested a topic, and parents were charged with encouraging attendance at parent workshop events.

Familial capital (Yosso, 2005) was used to trust parents’ decisions regarding workshop development. Visual reminders of past events and advertisements for current events in the form of flyers or announcements on bulletin boards near the parent meeting room included such things as support groups for breastfeeding, child and mother nutrition, home safety for children, pre- and post-birth advice, mental health and smoking cessation information, and couples counselling and support groups referrals.

Beyond the pre-natal medical room was a larger gathering space for small or large meetings. Family care workers described how a large multi-purpose room was used for families and the community, as well as by staff. Partnership services for new and young mothers were extended to include a mother’s room, where stay-and-play baby groups (for mothers and fathers of infants and toddlers) could occur, along with peer massage and baby-group community meetings. The multi-purpose room contained toys for younger siblings when teachers held conferences with families and was adjacent to several smaller, private rooms.

5.3. Home Visits and Family Groups

Teachers and family support workers at the Lillian de Lissa center spoke about conducting home visits “before, during or even after the school year began”, leading to the decision to establish “family groups”. Sometimes, home visits with family care workers occurred after the birth of a child or, according to the family care workers, as needed, depending on the vulnerability of the parent or child.

The teachers and family support staff at Lillian De Lissa explained that their primary ways of getting to know the parents were through family intake experiences, which were “gathered during a home visit from a classroom teacher or from visits conducted by family support workers”. Often, home visits were coordinated events between the teachers and family support staff, with both staff members present. Classroom teachers described during focus groups how “home visits might occur when a preschool child entered school or after the birth of a child”. Classroom teachers described how “home visits with families always generated a deeper knowledge of children”, which was then considered during classroom placements. Most importantly, “trust, myth-busting and listening to each families’ story, while offering parents time to talk” occurred between teachers and families on home visits.

Teachers described how smaller “family groups” were formed across classrooms and often within classrooms, led by one teacher. The grouping decisions for “family groups” were developed after home visits, based upon the age of the child, their family experiences, the child’s personality or interests, and the language or cultural of individual children. Teachers described collaborating on a regular basis with each other and family support workers, who could provide teachers with deeper information about the children or parents within each “family group”. Froggatt explained that “family groups” were created within and across classrooms to support the structure and rhythm of the school day and helped to build security among community members. Teachers elaborated how “family groups “supported each child’s “strong sense of belonging to their own teacher” and “family groups” of about thirteen children came together for group times, like “breaks for fruit and milk, lunch, and stories at the end of the day, as well as for activities and school outings with families to places like a local farm throughout the year”. Teachers noted that the six or seven smaller “family groups” within the Center were created “after home visits and groups of students were matched based upon demographic intake during home visits”. According to preschool teachers, the “curriculum was supported by what was learned on home visits…like when Eid was celebrated with special books, or when a parent invited themselves in to do henna or crafts”, or when teachers asked families to share knowledges that were incorporated into the school day.

5.4. Intake Experiences and the Center’s Family Album

The questions on the family intake forms denoted a high level of thought, as family support workers and teachers collaborated to perfect intercultural communication. Intercultural understanding was demonstrated via intake questionnaires, which created opportunities to build family support worker’s interpersonal relationships with newcomer families. Exchanges of knowledge, which could increase understanding and navigate cultural differences, were described by teachers as the starting point of these intake exchanges (Cushner et al., 2022; Olson et al., 2006). For teachers, intake experiences during home visits were formed around questions that allowed them to get to know the parents’ views of their children and gather the parent’s educational goals while building the children’s trust.

Teachers described home visits as “open ended” with intake elements that help the teachers to create a family page for every child at the Center; these were housed in the Center Family Album. The Center Family Album comprised friendly photographs teachers took of parents and children in their home, listing siblings and adults by name on sticky notes. Upon the completion of home visits, this photo page became part of the Center Family Album, connecting the entire school. The album, with basic (not sensitive) details about each family and child, could help families feel welcomed and get to know one another, taking advantage of or creating navigational capital.

The rituals of home visits, open-ended intakes, and the building of a Center Family Album at the Lillian de Lissa Center enacted the stated goals in the school handbook of “building social cohesion within the community”. Within the family album (a large, three-ring binder) each family and child enrolled in the center, with a dedicated page in a clear pocket containing their family photo and relevant, information about their child’s likes and dislikes (such as what they might enjoy and are good at, or a favorite food or place they love, or what their child wanted to be when they grew up). The family page was informed by parents’ knowledge of, and often aspirations for, their child, information gathered by the teachers. The Center Family Album might contain small details about parents too, like where they are from or something they are proud of (like going to classes, being good at making a particular kind of dish or taking a recent trip).

5.5. Supporting Family Well-Being

During the observation, Kroeger saw aspects of the local, global, and international levels of interaction and exchange among family support workers as she accompanied one family-support worker on a short visit to a mother’s home within a nearby multi-story apartment complex. At de Lissa, family support workers have expertise in infant development, with a focus on maternal well-being. During the visit, the family care worker was attending to the emotional health of the mother, who had recently experienced domestic trauma as well as war. In this instance, the family care worker was observing the maternal and child’s well-being. After the visit, the family care worker explained that she was “looking at not just the physical conditions in the small apartment, but the emotional health of mom and baby including secure relationships”. Seeing that this young mother “was in good spirits with a smiling jovial baby”, the family support worker expressed “confidence and relief” that her early concerns about maternal depression were unfounded.

The following examples of questions raised within the family care worker’s intake form (quite different from that of teachers) denote how the questions posed to families generate opportunities for intercultural exchange within parent-engagement strategies (

Table 1. Antenatal Group Questionnaire.

Parent Questions
Have you registered at a children’s centre before?
Would your partner like to attend an ante natal group? What would make it more accessible for them? Lunchtime/evening meeting?
Would you like to attend an ante natal group?
To enable you to access the group would you require additional support? For instance, an interpreter, support with other children, transport or mobility?
Would you like information about breast feeding and the support available?
The Sure Start Maternity Grant is available to all mothers who meet their requirements, have you applied?
Did you know you can get free milk for your child for five years and Healthy Start vouchers to get money off healthy food choices (fruit & veg) whilst you are pregnant and once your baby starts weaning? Vitamins are also available.
Would you like information about quitting smoking? Secondhand smoke is also just as dangerous as smoking and could have serious effects for your baby.
Have you thought about safety at home once your new addition arrives?
Is there any information that you or your partner would like to know, or questions that you have about any aspect of pregnancy?
Are you aware of the help and services available to you after the birth?
Would you like advice and help on the benefits that you are entitled to now that your circumstances have changed?
Are you interested in the events and services that we run here at the Children’s Centre for every member of your family?
Have you received your £190 health in pregnancy grant? Every pregnant woman is eligible from their 25th week of pregnancy.

). Although some of the questions are yes or no, family support worker’s informal questions as open-ended and basic, provided openings for parents to share their expertise regarding their own child’s educational life or their arrival story and concerns. Requests for support are framed in positive ways.

By prioritizing first-language presence in the school overall, as well as within service provision, the Lillian de Lissa Center staff work to ensure that family support roles are held by people who could provide some understanding to families/parents on behalf of the classrooms. Family-centrism entails high-quality services in first languages, which are particularly important to support the language acquisition of young children; dual languages can be used as a cognitive and social asset (NAEYC, 2019). Home visits by family support workers with knowledge of the parents’ home counties, religions, or cultures provide teachers with the information to take steps to provide for the children’s needs. Ensuring mothers have access to health care, nutrition, and safety in their homes, or even emotional and physical ties to their home culture (in the school), or financial and social support (as services or workshops), made this school functional. Parent intake mechanisms such as enrollment materials and home visits by staff, as well as the ritualistic creation of the Center Family Album, were not singularly tied to building community but also served as a valuable tool to collect and share rapport-building information. The close relationships between family support workers and classroom teachers in “family groups” also allowed for up-to-date information about young children and their basic family circumstances to be ethically and more privately conveyed.

6. Conclusions

In this paper, we described the techniques used at the de Lissa Center to frame parent-centric engagement practices, creating a counter-story to offset school-centrism. Pacini-Ketchabaw and Schecter (2002) frame teacher’s actions in diverse settings in at least three ways: (1) differences as deficit (teachers primarily facilitating a school-driven agenda), (2) intercultural sensitivity used as a pedagogic tool, and (3) diversity as curriculum (2002). Many of the de Lissa Center’s practices demonstrate intercultural sensitivity and diversity as curriculum. For example, the Center Family Album and its organic creation, derived from home visits, or the observation of one skilled family care worker providing openings in their conversation with a young asylum-seeking mother, demonstrate nuanced forms of relational intention. While learning about the processes of home visits at this center, we were reminded that if teachers approach families with techniques framed in such a way as to build teachers’ knowledge, parents will intuit the intention of the care worker or teachers as non-intrusive, attempting to support the child’s education.

Global changes, which are driven by economic and political circumstances, force school settings to adjust to newcomer and immigrant or refugee populations, and these might be more difficult populations for schools and teachers to understand, requiring nuanced forms of high-quality, tailored skills on the part of schools and teachers. As schools across the world have struggled with adapting to difference, for many nations that were once mono-lingual or homogenous in terms of cultural and religious expression, new influxes of different immigrant groups have proven challenging. This requires an adaptation of how we support young children and their diverse families (NAEYC, 2019).

Recognizing that diversity includes dominant classes of individuals in relation to historically marginalized families may help the reader to understand how counter-stories can be framed in contrast to the more traditional, hierarchical ways in which parent engagement often ensue (Brantlinger & Jabbari, 1998; Lareau, 1989). Effective parent engagement is often logically linked to things like school achievement, which is also often tied to how people are allowed to move up or down in society. Doing well in the proscribed school roles of parent engagement allows some families to climb socially within schools as their children achieve academically, while those in marginalized positions are often blamed (through a perceived deficit in their parenting) for qualities and habits they do not bring to school to advantage their children (Brantlinger & Jabbari, 1998; Landeros, 2011; Lareau, 1989, 2018). The parent-centric practices described in the Lillian de Lissa Center have the potential to shift some of the power dynamics and institutional privileges that dominant classes of parents bring, using different and varied techniques to elevate families/parents’ cultural wealth through the family care worker and teacher’s efforts.

Counter-stories, like the ones from the de Lissa Center, can resist school-centrism, in which traditional school-driven exchanges create a power imbalance in parent engagement. When centers adapt to the presence of diverse families, parents can become the drivers of professional knowledge, countering the view of historically marginalized parents as being deficient. The techniques described in this small observational/focus group study created openings for parents/families from which cultural wealth, linguistic capital, or navigational capital could arise, with the power to reframe children’s school experiences and empower families/parents. As researchers, we believe that families’ perspectives (supported by the techniques shown here) are a legitimizing tool for the curriculum and have the potential to drive family engagement as co-constructed, inquiry-driven encounters. This is found in many scholars’ work but hinges upon wholistic organizational structures as well as individual teachers and directors and staff efforts (Crenshaw, 1991; Delgado, 1989; Fenton et al., 2017; Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Schecter, 2002; Shaw & Morgan, 2019; Sisson, 2024; Sisson et al., 2025; Yosso, 2005).

7. Implications

Throughout the world, the reasons for the increases in migration include factors such as the free movement of labor, growing demographic disparities, the effects of climate change, new economic conditions, and technological revolutions, as political asylum-seekers present themselves as refugees in new countries (Boix-Mansilla & Jackson, 2011). The global goals of increasing parent-centrism within family-engagement techniques (as called for in this collection) might be due to an increasing recognition of the divisions between wealth and poverty, as globally situated communities are bound together with a variety of newcomer families, and often fundamentally tied to a closer integration of countries and peoples from around the world (Olson et al., 2006, 2007).

The problems of globally interdependent economies, as well as wealthier countries’ colonization of smaller nation-states with less power, have created international and national contexts in which geopolitics have created very complex learning communities, which are likely to be quite difficult for teachers to navigate. Political rhetoric that demonizes immigrant families as dangerous and portrays them as stealing jobs does not help teachers’ or parents’ morale or mental reasoning. Immigrant parents will continue to raise children in new national contexts, struggling to adapt (Yoshikawa, 2011). As communities continue to be more closely bound together, or even “thrown together” in ways that teachers are underprepared for, learning from centers like the Lillian de Lissa Center becomes even more important.

Home visits, like those carried out by the de Lissa staff, in which the information that was shared elevated the knowledge of teachers, is especially important. Teachers might often fail to understand how their own actions are filled with assumptions about ideal, traditional levels of parental involvement, especially regarding what should be done or what can be done in the home on behalf of children, which is sometimes based on the roles played in dominant families (often of a higher social economic class). Home visits allow professionals to “adapt” their thinking or assumed cultural models of practice, which is especially important for schools with families of newcomer, low-income, linguistic, ethnic, or immigrant status, such as the parents at the de Lissa Center (Kroeger & Lash, 2011; Landeros, 2011).

One important reason to understand and carry out parent-centric engagement effectively in contemporary schools is the need to equalize opportunities for all members of society, recognizing that diversity includes who have been historically marginalized as well as historically privileged (Brantlinger & Jabbari, 1998; Kroeger, 2005; Kroeger et al., 2019; Lareau, 1989, 2018). Eliminating structural inequities in parent engagement and school functioning is difficult, but one of the most important skills teachers (or schools) might have. Family-centrism in parent engagement, in the form of counter-stories about practice, shows promise; readers can learn from exemplars like the Lillian de Lissa Center, their director Jane Froggatt, their teachers, the many family support workers, and most importantly of all, the parents, who have always been and will continue to be the experts on their own children.

8. Limitations

The write-up of this small study was part of a more complex data set that included center-wide curriculum descriptions in preschool classrooms. Focus groups, combined with the use of printed materials and focus group conversations, may have limited the depth of the description of practices that was possible after curriculum descriptions were omitted. In this write-up, we may have over-relied on the use of photos and descriptions to convey practices, which may have flattened what the researchers saw as highly effective parent-centered engagement practices. The practices described in this writing did not capture the interactions taking place but only described some of the starting points from which the staff at the de Lissa Center operate.

On the days in which the research was conducted, two family support workers were available for focus group participation, limiting the richness of the family support worker interviews. Additionally, the use of counter-stories as a conceptual tool in this write-up would have ideally included parents’ reflections about the Center, or noted teachers’ process of learning (or unlearning) about families/parents through the described techniques in more depth. Unfortunately, the study was largely unfunded, and data was collected in the most efficient but not the most detailed way possible.

Finally, as researchers, we know that practices in preschool settings (like Lillian de Lissa Center Belgravia) are often more intimate, slower encounters, created in smaller groups than those created (or even possible) in most elementary settings. As scholars, we resist standardized approaches to education (including parent engagement), and yet we recognize that the time demands (because of standardized curriculums and their onerous assessments) in many public-school settings will make the strategies described here quite difficult to imitate.