TLS501

040393

This course provides students with strategies for facilitating family and community engagement in educational settings. Students will develop the dispositions, knowledge, and skills to engage in constructive collaborations with students, their families, and local communities while keeping issues of race, class, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and language at the forefront. Students will understand family involvement as framed within local cultures, values, and knowledge systems. In particular, students will examine the larger questions: what does it mean to engage, advocate, and learn with/from families and communities within an educational context? How might the history of schooling among diverse students, families, and communities impact the notion of what family and community engagement is? How might sustaining partnerships between families and communities contribute to reaching larger goals of student achievement?

The focus is to develop a critical consciousness about the varying aspects and nuances that inform the purpose and process for generating partnerships with families and communities.

Course readings and projects are designed to develop students' critical awareness about the complexities and strengths underlying family and community engagement. Students will develop their abilities to advocate a particular position not as an opinion but as a critical, reflective and substantiated argument. Students will develop their abilities to think, speak and write critically, clearly, and with reflection.

GRD - Regular Grades A, B, C, D, E

Graduate

TLS401