A Familycentric Approach to Schooling: What It Is, What It Takes, What It Looks Like

A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2025 | Viewed by 229

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Department of Curriculum Studies, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 0X1, Canada
Interests: familycentric schooling; parent engagement; systematic parent engagement; parent knowledge; a philosophy and pedagogy of walking alongside; a curriculum of parents

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

A “schoolcentric” (Lawson, 2003) approach characterized our educational institutions for decades. It resulted in parents being marginalized in relation to their children’s schooling, asked to serve the agenda determined by school personnel—through fundraising and volunteering, helping their children with assigned homework, and ensuring their children came to school ready and able to learn. Arising out of 50 years of research in the field, a shift to a “familycentric” (Pushor, 2015) approach is taking hold in a number of schools and communities across the globe. In this Special Issue, we foreground work being carried out across the educational sector that aims to engage parents in authentic and meaningful ways, using their “parent knowledge” (Pushor, 2015), and giving them place and voice in the development of policies, programs, and practices affecting their children and families. Within the aim and scope of this Special Issue, we are seeking papers that are demonstrative of “familycentric” policies and practices currently being conceptualized, developed, lived in practice, and/or researched. We will feature a peer-reviewed assemblage of papers that achieve the following:

  • Reflect a diversity of experiences and disparate backgrounds;
  • Are contextual but with relevance to a broader context;
  • Extend theoretical understandings;
  • Propose new directions for policy, practice, and research;
  • Translate policy into lived action;
  • Reflect sound and current research;
  • Are representative of all levels of schooling, from early years through post-secondary, and a wide range of stakeholders across, and in relationship with, the education sector.

Our intent with this Special Issue is to provide the field with ideas that will move us into new possibilities and will help us re-imagine schools in ways that give place and voice to all parents and families, and that are equally honoring and reflective of parent knowledge and teacher knowledge.

Prof. Dr. Debbie Pushor
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • parent engagement
  • parent knowledge
  • familycentric schooling
  • a curriculum of parents

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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