Critical Issues Literacy Connections between School and Home: How Should We Evaluate Them?

Abstract

The value of a partnership between teachers and parents in the promotion of children's literacy appears self-evident. It symbolizes both the school's accountability to the community it serves and the complementary responsibility of families to support the school's agenda of empowering their children with the tools of civilization. Many parents and teachers across the world perceive, however, that there is something amiss with the relations between them. On the one hand, they share an interest in the literacy development of the same children, and in some sense, they subscribe to an implicit contract to share responsibility for promoting it. Yet, disagreement frequently arises about how this contract is to be executed in practice. In this eclectic review of research, I consider three complementary ways in which the nature of the connection between children's homes and the schools they attend can be problematized, each focusing on a different criterial dimension for evaluating the home-school connection: (a) congruence of family life with the agenda of schooling, (b) intimacy, or depth of understanding, between teachers and parents, and (c) sociocultural productivity of the interaction between the school and its students' home communities.