From Periphery To Center: A New Vision For Family, School, And Community Partnerships
Written by Harvard Family Research Project’s Heather Weiss and Naomi Stephen, this chapter—which will appear in the Handbook of School–Family Partnerships, edited by Sandy Christenson, Ph.D. and Amy Reschley, Ph.D.—presents a comprehensive, integrated family, school, and community partnership framework that can help level the playing field for disadvantaged children and ensure that they have access to the parental involvement and community engagement practices of their more advantaged peers in order to enhance their learning.
The authors discuss the strong developmental research case for family–school–community partnerships and emphasize the need for continued evaluations to demonstrate the types of partnerships and involvement practices that are best correlated with positive student outcomes. Instead of narrowly defining education reform as initiatives that take place within the walls of K–12 school buildings, Weiss and Stephen argue for the need to address the wide range of external factors that influence children’s learning success, and illustrate how family–school–community partnerships provide opportunities to broaden our definition of schooling and understanding about where learning takes place.
