Families as Researchers and Intellectual Activists
By María Paula Ghiso and Gerald Campano
María Paula Ghiso and Gerald Campano wrote the article, “Care, Support, and Solidarity: Families Demanding a Universal Vision of Student Flourishing” in the latest quarterly issue of The Educational Forum.
We’ve heard the adage many times—for teachers to just close the classroom door and do what they need to do to support their students. Amid the pressures of escalating mandates, high stakes accountability, curriculum wars, and the many precarities that students face, including from forced displacement and migration, teaching can seem like an impossible profession where one can never do enough. One response can be to retreat into the community of one’s own classroom. But the problem is this merely reinforces a teacher’s feeling of isolation. And we know that the best teaching occurs when educators collaborate in professional networks, investigate their practice, and learn alongside colleagues.
Families can also feel alienated in supporting their children’s schooling. This is especially the case for Black, Brown, and Immigrant families, who face many challenges navigating an inherently unequal educational system. A parent may stay up late at night translating their child’s homework into their native language or trying to make sense of the school district’s impenetrable bureaucracy. They might fear the presence of immigration officers at their child’s school. They may juggle economic precarity and exploitative labor conditions. They may worry about how to communicate their child’s brilliance and advocate for a robust education amid remediation, tracking, and deficit labels. They may instruct their children how to deal with racist or xenophobic comments. Often these battles can be invisible to teachers.
But what happens when families strive to break down these walls of isolation and work together to research schooling and be in closer dialogue with teachers? What might education look like when families’ experiences are front and center? That is the story of the CARE (Communities Advancing Research in Education) group, a research collective of families and youth from Philadelphia’s Black, Mexican, and Indonesian communities. Together, the group has been researching issues of educational access and equity for over a decade and going public with their work to audiences of teachers, school leaders, and educational researchers. Through the CARE group, families have created a network of care and support that has enhanced the educational opportunities of all youth involved. Through their research, they have an important message to the broader field of education: True educational justice can only be achieved through collective intellectual inquiry and action led by those most directly impacted by systemic inequities. They help us imagine an educational system based not on individual competition, but rather one in which families and educators work in solidarity toward a universal vision of student flourishing.
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María Paula Ghiso is Professor of Literacy Education and Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her scholarship investigates literacy in multilingual and transnational contexts and community-based research methodologies. She has published in venues such as Teachers College Record, Research in the Teaching of English, Language Arts, Harvard Educational Review, Urban Education, and Journal of Literacy Research. María Paula is co-author of Partnering with immigrant communities: Action through Literacy (Teachers College Press) and Methods for community-based research: Advancing educational justice and epistemic rights (Routledge). María Paula & Gerald’s collective work with the Communities Advancing Research in Education (CARE) Initiative in Philadelphia received the 2023 Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education from AERA (the American Educational Research Association). |
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Gerald Campano is Professor of Literacy Studies at the Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. He is a former classroom teacher in Houston Texas and California’s Central Valley. Gerald’s research focuses on elementary education, critical literacy, the lives and learning of immigrant students, and participatory research methodologies. His teaching and scholarship have garnered multiple recognitions, including the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English from the National Council for the Teachers of English in 2009 and 2018, as well as the Edward B. Fry Book Award from the Literacy Research Association in 2017. Gerald received the 2024 Steve Witte Lifetime Achievement Award from AERA’s Writing and Literacies SIG.
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