Educators Learning Lessons From Multilingual Family Engagement Through the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

We report on a project to support teachers and district administrators working with multilingual learners as they deepened relationships and understandings with multilingual families in five Oregon school districts. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which radically shifted the ways educators engaged with students' families, we repurposed this ongoing research to answer the question How did teachers' and supporting administrators' conceptions of and actions to promote multilingual family engagement shift in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Further influenced by the concurrent national protests for racial justice, we consider how teachers and administrators engaged in liberatory work as they questioned structures that had previously seemed inevitable or unproblematic. Framed using Harro's cycle of liberation, we discuss lessons learned based on systematic data collected from both teachers and administrators from multiple districts and multiple time points before and during pandemic-impacted schooling.