Reimagining the Role of Families in Educational Justice

Sherri Wilson:
Welcome, everybody. Super excited to have you with us today. We have an amazing presentation scheduled for you. As you come in and join us, and we’re waiting for quite a few more people to log on, go ahead and introduce yourselves in the chatbox. Let us know who you are and where you are. We are always excited to see where our attendees come from. I’m Sherri Wilson, the Director of Engagement and State Partnerships at the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement. I’m really excited to welcome you to the webinar today. We have an amazing, amazing presentation for you. I hope all of you had a chance to get Dr. Ishimaru’s book before the webinar. But if not, you can still get it, it’s not too late. You’re going to want it, especially after you hear what she has to say. It is amazing. We are really excited to have so many of you with us today.

Sherri Wilson:
A couple of reminders, if you are using the chatbox, make sure that you select the dropdown items that says Everyone, otherwise, it defaults to panelists, and we want to make sure that everybody sees all of your fun messages. So make sure you change that dropdown from Host and Panelists to Everyone so we can all see your messages. Also, before you even ask, we are going to send a copy of the recording to everybody that registered. So you will get the recording after the webinar’s over. It’ll take us a couple of days to process it, and then we’ll send it out to all of you.

Sherri Wilson:
So hello. I see a lot of old friends in the chatbox today. It is lovely to have all of you with us. We are going to go ahead and get started now. Remember, change your chat messages to Everyone. Otherwise, it’ll just be visible to the hosts and panelists. Also, if you have questions as we go through the webinar today, be sure and put those in the Q&A box. If you put them in the chatbox, it might get lost. As you can tell, it’s a very fast-moving screen. We want to make sure we answer as many of your questions as we can, so please post those questions in the Q&A box as we go through the session today.

Sherri Wilson:
So welcome, everybody. I am Sherri Wilson, the Director of Engagement and State Partnerships at the National Association of Family, School, and Community Engagement. We are going to start today by introducing our amazing speaker. We have with us today Dr. Ann Ishimaru, she is the Bridge Family Associate Professor of Educational Foundations, Leadership, and Policy at the University of Washington’s College of Education, as well as a mom, an auntie, a daughter, and a granddaughter. Her scholarship focuses on understanding and cultivating family, community, and systems-based leadership to foster educational justice in P-12 schools and communities.

Sherri Wilson:
As a Principal Investigator of the Family Leadership Design Collaborative and the Racial Equity and Educational Leadership Research projects, her research aims to transform racialized drifts and build systemic capacity to collaborate with racially minoritized students, families, and communities in transformative educational change-making. She received the 2017 AERA Exemplary Contributions to Practice-Engaged Research Award and the 2016 UCEA Culbertson Early Career Award. In addition to her numerous peer-reviewed articles in top educational research journals, she recently published Just Schools: Building Equitable Collaborations with Families and Communities through the Teacher’s College Press. And I think all of you should have had a link to purchase that with a discount code and free shipping, so I hope you did. But we’ll also share that again at the end of the presentation. So with that, I would like to welcome Dr. Ishimaru.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Wonderful. Thank you very much. I’m so delighted to be here with you all today, and it’s wonderful to see so many names and folks in the chat. I’m going to share my screen here. All right, hopefully, everyone can see that. As you know, here I wanted to share a little bit with you today about some of the work that I’ve been engaged in and the tremendous opportunity, but also many of the challenges about re-imagining the role of families in educational justice work.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I wanted to start today by acknowledging that I’m coming to you from the indigenous lands of the Duwamish, the Suquamish, and the other Coast Salish peoples. I think we always need to start by recognizing the original and the ongoing stewards of these territories, but also to recognize that settler colonialism is not a historical event that ended at a certain point in time, but is an ongoing dynamic that continues on and that all of us, and especially settlers like me, can too easily perpetuate those dynamics when we disregard or erase the indigenous lands, the knowledges, and the peoples that we are living among now. I also want to acknowledge the stolen labor of enslaved people of African descent who really built this country, and to honor and appreciate both the past and the ongoing labor of immigrants who work for our collective benefit.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
As you heard in my intro, in addition to being on the faculty of the University of Washington and being a scholar and a parent, I’m also a granddaughter. This is actually an image of my grandmother. Her family, they were farmers, railroad workers before World War II. This is a picture of her with my father. She’s dressed, I think, rather Natalie but a picture here actually in Arizona. She is here in a place called Poston, which was one of the incarceration camps during World War II. It’s in Arizona on the lands of the Colorado River Indian Reservation. And so, these histories are here today with us. I just want to invite all of you as we begin this conversation and journey to think of and invite into this space an ancestor, or an elder, a chosen family member, somebody who helps to root you and the commitments that you have in this space.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Today, I’m going to situate us really specifically in this moment and thinking about learning in this pandemic and in the continuing pandemic and thinking about that as a portal. I’ll talk about that in a minute. If you have had a chance to get my book, you have an idea about equitable collaboration. This is a kind of paradigm shift in how we think about and approach families in education. I’m going to talk in particular about one aspect of that, and that has to do with the role of cultural brokers, cultural brokering, and what I’ve come to call systems brokering. And then I want to make sure that I have some time at the end for us to have some discussion and to do some Q&A.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I’m going to, let’s see, make sure I’ve got my chat going on here. Okay. So early on in the pandemic, Arundhati Roy talked about pandemics as a portal. She said, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” And I think a lot of us were really taken by that framing. As a way, she invited us to think about what is it that we want to leave behind as we go through this portal, and what is it that we want to bring with us, and what new ways of being and doing do we want to re-imagine as we step through this portal.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Now, I just want to acknowledge the enormous toll that this pandemic and all the things that have unfolded in the last two or so years have taken. The numbers are mind-boggling at this point, and we’re not done. So I just want to honor all of you who are holding so much both in terms of our own personal roles as members of families and communities, but also as professionals and recognizing the incredibly important work that all of you are doing to help support families and young people and the many impacts that they’ve experienced through their jobs, through stability in terms of their housing, through our ability to gather as communities, through the impacts on the emotional and psychological wellbeing, and through the racial reckonings that I’m going to talk a little bit more as well about in a minute.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So what is it that we learned in and through the pandemic? Because I want to suggest that the discourse right now broadly in the education field is a whole lot about what young people have lost. There’s a really dominant discourse around learning loss. I think that really aligns to a broader narrative, a deficit-based narrative that we have to be really careful about. It’s not to say that things were not lost. There were certainly many children had to learn firsthand about grief and loss. And we did have really disrupted schooling for millions of children across the country, and that continues even now. At the same time, though, I think it’s important for us to also ask, “What did we learn and how are we moving forward from that learning?”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Some of the research that my team and I were having involved in during the time of the pandemic really identified the ways in which especially families of color were cultivating learning for their students, even when students were not in schools. We moved to this entirely remote situation in many places. And so, there’s a quote by Shereese Rhodes who’s a parent leader that I worked closely with. When this question was asked of her, she said, “We learned that while we don’t have educational degrees in teaching, we have doctorates in our children. We know how our children best learn.” And I think that many families and many of you already knew that, and it became even clearer. When all of a sudden we had this shift, there was a lot of remote learning going on, and there was a sense that not only… We were no longer in a space where people could give lip service to the importance of families, but we were reckoning with the idea that schools and educational systems were absolutely dependent on the knowledge and supports that families were providing.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
We also looked at what other forms of learning families were cultivating during these times. One of the things that really stood out in this, we did a report in Seattle as part of a research-practice partnership that we were a part of, and there were families who really expressed the shift. One of the shifts had to do with especially black boys feeling more at ease. They were not dealing with constant racial microaggressions at school. In the case of many families who have languages other than English at home, they were speaking their home languages. They were engaging in activities at home. They were cooking. They were taking care of extended family, and they were also learning from what was happening in the racial reckonings that were unfolding across the country after the murder of George Floyd.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
One parent said, “I will say that my son has definitely been learning more about activism and organizing since the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. He’s actually been involved in some of the rallies and marches. And so, he actually comes from a family of activists.” So really beginning to recognize, I think, that the learning continued on. It didn’t necessarily look like what might be measured on a standardized assessment, but there were still powerful forms of learning that were happening in families and communities.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Another finding from that report that I think has really stood out is this idea of safety as not only physical safety but also emotional, social, and psychological. One Somali mom told us, “My child was not safe at school before. How can I trust the school will take care of him now?” And so I think there’s a broad conversation that has emerged especially with regard to families of color and the mistrust they feel in relation to schools. For many of these families, that’s not new. It’s related to these historically based and ongoing injustices that they have experienced.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I would suggest that we might also need to think about what have educational systems learned. And so, I want to first just give you a moment to stare at this image. Go ahead and put in the chat, what do you notice about this image before I launch into some things that I think that some school systems have learned? I’m going to just pause and let you put some ideas in here. What do you notice? Thanks. A couple of people putting things in, go ahead. People are putting into Everyone. Just a reminder to put it to Everyone. So Jonathan notices the home is a central location.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
“One parent only,” Michelle says. Nicole notices that school’s in the middle. So does Nancy. “School building is in the center,” Barbara mentioned. “Learning happening everywhere.” “Buildings and people are separated.” Cindy’s noticing we’re all connected. Heather says, “It’s more than just a school, it’s a community effort.” Justin also noticing the community. Tabitha is noticing families. “Arrows pointing outwards from the school or not inward,” says Venita. “School is at the center,” Lindsey says, “but it doesn’t seem interconnected.” Minerva noticing schools as a resource hub. Rachel noticing education used to take place in schools, now we realize the location for school must be the whole community. Connections, disconnections, people are noticing. The need for resources and connection. Thank you.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Yeah, I think one of the reasons I share this is because it sparks so many different things that people bring up. Yukio notices things are siloed. So yeah, a lot of times people notice the arrows. There’s a certain direction of those arrows. The directionality of those arrows, one going one way. People notice that things are not connected with each other. Laura is mentioning a white transgender student with multiple disabilities and her sense of safety and comfort being at home far more than at a school. Oops, sorry. Ah, hang on, I’m doing this the wrong way. Going too far. Okay.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Yeah. And so, I think this really relates to a lot of the things that I think became more apparent during the pandemic and ongoing that on the one hand, we realized that schools were expected to carry a whole lot more than academic learning. Suddenly, with all of these pivots, they were expected to carry food, healthcare, communications, all kinds of other functions that schools were expected to carry. But also a kind of recognition that even as schools are centrally important, they are not always at the center for families. That there are many other institutions. And that our models of approaching family engagement, though, tend to center the school and the schoolhouse. They tend to be focused on these kinds of one-way relationships, but not necessarily connecting between them as a few of you have noticed.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
And yes, I think people are also saying, “Teachers felt that they were not equipped to teach online, that there weren’t the kind of connections that we might imagine or want to see.” And so, I think there are folks who are already engaging families in really robust ways, and those really helped to sustain the relationships and to sustain young people and their connections with schools. But in one conversation we had in a local district, we talked to 45 Somali parents, and they came from 19 different schools. Parents from three of those schools felt like those relationships are strong and they maintained and helped them whether education and supporting their children during the pandemic. You can imagine that means the parents from 16 other schools didn’t feel that way. So a lot of other schools recognized that they weren’t actually doing as good a job of being in robust communication and support with their families as they thought.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
It turns out that they lost a lot of kids during that time. That dominant school-centered approach became far more visible when school was no longer the site of schooling. It became much more visible, I think, this kind of dominant model of family engagement that we have. It can be very well-intended, but it is our kind of dominant default model. For many families and communities of color, it actually can cause them to disengage as a result of these kinds of practices because they are focused on training them to be different helpers in support of schools’ agendas and expectations. These approaches assume schools are neutral spaces, and they disregard profound historical, racial, and power inequities. And they function to assimilate nondominant families and communities to individualistic white, middle-class norms, values, and behaviors.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So we have a default theory of change that gets operationalized around racial equity and families, especially families of color, where educators and professionals set the agenda. The agenda entails “fixing” black, indigenous, and other people of color students, families, and communities. Individual students succeed usually as measured by standardized assessments. And then we get racial equity. That’s a kind of implicit default theory of change. One of the things that results from that are these kinds of experiences that I hear. One of the things that I think really strikes me about these, I fore-graded black and African-American families in the beginning, these are families from immigrant contexts, but each of these families comes from a different system, a different place geographically. They are speaking in relation to children who are very different ages. One of them is in an early childhood context, others have high school students or the whole span. So I want to just invite you to take a minute. I’m going to go ahead and read these aloud for you. And then go ahead in the chat again and take a minute and see what do you notice about these parents’ experience?

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So Mary who’s Vietnamese and has four children says, “I went to the parent nights and events for the first year, then afterwards I just walked away. We were just getting talked at, and we were just there by ourselves. We couldn’t talk to anybody else. I haven’t gone too much after that because I had other activities. Javier who’s Mexican and a father of four explained, “I want my children to succeed, but schools here are very different. We always feel we are outside the system. We go to the school and nobody speaks our language.” He went on to explain in that one that even when they get things in Spanish, they’re translated by a computer, so they don’t even make sense. Fatima who is a mother of three said, “We talk with the teachers and they tell us what we should do. They tell us our children are not doing well compared to children who only speak English. But my three-year-old child speaks two languages and is learning English. We know when people are judging us.”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So go ahead and take a minute. What do you notice across these even though they’re coming from very different communities, very different school systems, different age groups? All right, thank you. Go ahead and keep putting those in there. Shazia notices the onus is on the parents to change instead of the schools. There isn’t a sense of belonging, inclusion, or ownership. “Teachers are talking to not with parents. They don’t feel included,” says Carrie. Koheeda says, “They are feeling disrespect. Feelings of isolation.” There’s a need for somebody. There isn’t anyone providing a bridge for multi-language learners and families feeling left out. Brenda says, “Not a sense of belonging, anger.” “Us versus them,” says Sabine. No trust, little value added. Thank you. “Deficit minds of educators,” says Heather. Common experience. So some of you may have heard some of these things in your own context.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
What I want to suggest is that there is a different way to approach this. I think that we’ve learned from these examples, but also it has been brought into stark relief by the pandemic that there are different ways that we can do things. Everything got thrown up in the air, and unfortunately, I think one of the things that’s happening is they’re settling back down to where they were before. I think that there’s this great desire for a sense of normalcy and a return to the normal that many folks are feeling. At the same time, that normal was very problematic and many of the things that you’re highlighting in the chat here about the ways that families are experiencing schools, young people experience schools, highlights that that normal wasn’t working for many young people and families. That normal was actually exacerbating the kind of racial inequities that exist in the broader society but then become a microcosm as we bring them into schools.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So equitable collaboration suggests that there’s a different way we might need to approach this if we want to build more just schools. Equitable collaborations are efforts to partner between young people, families, and schools, and educators that are working towards transformative systems change that reshapes power and builds solidarities in the process. So that means instead of trying to fix individual young people and students or fix families, we’re trying to collectively work towards systems change. Instead of families being beneficiaries or clients who are passive recipients, they are fellow leaders who can help contribute to the kinds of changes we want to see. The strategies are really focused on relationship building but also change capacity-building, not to assimilate people towards a school-centered agendas but to collectively engage in supporting student learning in robust ways and towards systems change. Towards educational justice and towards broader community wellbeing. And finally, equitable collaborations really recognizing that changes is infused with these historically rooted dynamics of power and power asymmetries.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So here’s the, whatever, $100 billion question, well, how do we get from here to there? So we can imagine that we have a different model that we might be trying to go towards, and some of my research actually highlights some systems and places where that was beginning to unfold, but it’s a whole other thing to say, “Well, how do we get from where we are now to beginning to pursue these more equitable forms of collaboration?” So today I want to highlight a particular set of practices and just recognize that we’re in this place now where so many educators are saying, “Yes, let’s change, let’s shift the approach.” The challenging part about that is that people are… We’re always looking for the thing, the package, the framework that’s going to help us figure it all out. There’s a lot of talk about trauma-informed care, about social-emotional learning, about MTSS.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Those can be really powerful frameworks. There’s no silver bullet, especially when it comes to families and racial equity. One of the things that many of these frameworks continue to hold in common, though, is a reaffirmation of the status quo approach in which families, parents, communities are peripheral to the real work. I want to suggest that we actually need to shift that paradigm and to center how we work with families and communities if we really want to make these kinds of changes.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
If you have my book, you are familiar already with the four principles that I talk about. Begin with families and communities, transform power, build reciprocity and agency, and undertaking change as collective inquiry. I’m going to hone in today on especially two of these and some practices we can take up to address these two things. I noticed in the chat that many of you are in roles… You may be in a family engagement department at a school district. You may be a community-based organization that’s particularly focused on supporting young people and their families and communities. You may be a parent liaison or family engagement person. So I thought I would hone in on cultural brokers because I think, increasingly, folks who have been hired into these roles are seen as the answer.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
And so here you can see my rose-colored glasses because I think it’s very attractive to think about this because, in theory, cultural brokers have a foot in both worlds. They have a foot in the world of formal institutions, educational systems, and also a foot in communities. Many of them actually reflect the cultural and linguistic communities of the families that we’re trying to serve. And so, this is just a quote from my book, “When undertaken with an aim of fostering equitable collaborations, cultural brokering by organizations or individuals offers the potential of building greater reciprocity by shifting the default ways of business and brokering knowledge, resources, and practices.”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
When I took my rose-colored glasses off and we did some research on the folks who are in these roles, and we looked at both formal systems and also non-profit organizations and the people who are in these roles, they have very different kinds of names and the broad strokes of their roles, the description position of their positions has some similarities, but there’s also a lot of variability. But in practice what we found when we’re looking at those is most of the brokering that was happening was one way, as in that diagram that I was showing you before. It was from the school to the parents. It was focused primarily on providing either information about what happens in schools and helping them to navigate or providing basic needs to families. A lot of times they were focused on socializing families into dominant norms and agendas.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
What ended up evolving out of that often was a feeling of token representation, experiences of organizational marginalization, especially in formal systems like in districts, and sometimes the kind of form of institutional gatekeeping. What that sounded like often was, “I know what families need. I’m the representative of what families need. They don’t necessarily need to be in this meeting process, deliberation, conversation, but nobody else will listen to me.” So we’ve got this dual complexity here of feeling like you’ve been tokenized as a representative of a particular community, feeling a sense of marginalization within the organization. But sometimes what that ends up in is a kind of inadvertent gatekeeping, because there is a sense of like, “Well, I don’t have access. I don’t have my voice acknowledged in here. But that’s my job. I need to represent what families are saying.” So it creates this really complicated dynamic because the institutions have set up the conditions for folks to do that, often are positioning folks in these roles to socialize and assimilate families to the school agenda.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So, what does all that mean? Does it mean we just throw out the whole idea of cultural brokers? Well, instead, what we said was, “Okay, so the predominance of cultural brokering was happening in those ways, but there were some ways that some different things were going on.” And so, I want to just spend a couple of minutes to walk us through what were some of those different approaches that the folks who are in these cultural brokering roles had taken up that seem to be building us towards openings and opportunities for more equitable forms of collaboration. I want to just say at the beginning, this wasn’t the dominant mode, but these were promising practices that seem to be opening up possibilities there.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Before I get into that, though, I want to put a distinction on the table that I’ve thought about more and more as a helpful distinction, about thinking about cultural brokers as community organizers. So those of you who are familiar with community organizing, I saw Annalivia’s on there, shout-out to Salem/Kaiser Coalition, organizers are the staff of an organization, and they work largely behind the scenes. Their job is to develop leaders, to develop relationship, and to develop power. They do that through often one-on-one conversations. They build relationships between people, between family members, between parents. And then they’re supporting cycles of organizing. In the case of many of the organizing groups that grow out of the Alinsky tradition of organizing, they’re supporting cycles of researching and understanding an issue, moving to a collective action through a campaign, and then reflecting to build community power and to make change. If you’re interested in learning more about the inner workings of community organizing, Match on Dry Grass is a book that I contributed to where we looked at a variety of different education organizing groups.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Leaders, on the other hand, in this scenario are the youth families and communities who are impacted by inequities and whose priorities and concerns drive change. They are the ones who are taking on different leadership roles. They’re interacting with public institutions. They’re the ones who are pushing for change. So that distinction, I think, is really helpful as we think about the role of cultural brokers not necessarily as the tokenized representatives out in front, or the ones who are deciding whose voice will be heard and when families might be present or participating in particular processes, but actually doing the behind-the-scenes work to develop these kinds of relationships and do some systems change work on the backend.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
First, we saw some of these folks fostering relational cultures and what a number of scholars have called politicized trust. The concept of trust that’s most predominant is this idea of social and relational trust, where it’s like, “I trust you to do what you say you’re going to do.” And that’s important. What a number of scholars are increasingly recognizing and what many families already know is that race and power shape our interactions all the time, because we’re not just like a blank slate when we’re interacting with families or when families are interacting with teachers or principals or district leaders. Those interactions are shaped by race and power, by role, by all kinds of dynamics. They have to be constantly renegotiated and cultivated, and they unfold in these everyday interactions over time. So it’s not like, “Okay, now I trust you, and then from here on out we don’t have to worry about thinking about trust.” It’s something that’s happening ongoing.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
And so, these folks were developing relationships not only between families and schools but also between families as well. So they were doing things like designating spaces for families to meet each other and share their experiences, share resources, share ideas, share struggles. They were supporting other educators in developing school routines that would invite families into the teaching and learning conversations and spaces. They were meeting families where they gathered, so there was a housing authority, for example. And instead of doing parent-teacher conferences or open houses at the school, for the families who lived in this housing authority, there was a community space, and so they would meet with them in that space. There was another example where they were meeting families. There was places where there were food. There was a community cafe. And so that they would meet the families at that community cafe. Another many of these folks we’re conducting meetings in families’ own language. So there were meetings in many different languages, and English was one of them of course, but there were many different languages for the different families who were in those contexts.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
And then I think this one I can’t stress enough, especially in light of where we’re at right now with the waning days of the pandemic but still so much uncertainty and so much coming at everyone, coming at young people trying to adjust to so many things, coming at families trying to make sense of what’s going on, coming at educators who are trying to negotiate all the many different demands but really beginning with learning. I don’t mean beginning with testing kids. But beginning with learning from our families about what their children’s experiences, beginning from learning from the young people themselves about their priorities and needs, and also just really taking responsibility for the missteps and inequities that exist.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
We have been working on something called learning circles. Those learning circles are… No, I’m happy to share, we have a brief about that. In one district, all of the principals in the district are beginning with the learning circle. They’re identifying a group of families that they have struggled to develop strong relationships with. They open up and ask them to be part of at least two conversations. The beginning of that conversation is taking some responsibility for the ways in which our schools and districts haven’t done a great job. Other than that, they’re not setting the agenda. They’re asking questions and really trying to learn from these families about what has gone on, what their priorities are, and moving forward there. Then they are committing to taking a next step and having another meeting.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I want to distinguish this from the listening sessions that have become really popular of late. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with listening, we do have to listen. That’s a crucial leadership move really. The problem with listening sessions is that they can reinforce the existing power dynamic where if I say, “No, I’m just going to listen to you now.” If I’m in a formal role. And then I’ve heard you, I’m going to go back to my office, I’m going to shut the door, I’m going to decide what I’m going to listen to and pay attention to and make changes about. And then if I’m really responsive, I’ll come back and tell you what I decided. And so just to keep us recognizing and pushing on that to realize that we still are then consolidating who has power and who gets to decide. So really trying to take some of these steps to deconstruct those assumptions about who gets to decide and how those processes.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
The second thing that we saw these folks in the cultural broker role was to really scaffold family leadership and influence. That really looked like providing supports and opportunities for what leadership scholars call stretch assignments that have increasing responsibility and influence. For example, there was a Somali father who was involved in one of these districts. They had a parent academy that was happening in many different… They were doing different breakouts by language. And he started as a recruiter, so his job was to make phone calls to other Somali families, to talk to his neighbors. He actually ended up then doing also some home visits. And so that was his first step if you will. Through that, he became interested in becoming a facilitator. So he recruited his cousin. They participated in trainings to become a facilitator of these parent workshops. And it developed some really strong relationships and was seen as a leader in his family and community.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
When that program ended, he continued to provide monthly gatherings. He would host gatherings at his home for the Somali families in his neighborhood. And eventually then, out of that recognized a really pressing need to do more intergenerational work, especially around Somali language. He ended up teaching and creating a parent-child Somali language class during the summers, and then became a really important resource and leader at the district level as they were trying to decide what next steps should look like for these efforts. So that was just an example of, for one individual, how there were different kinds of opportunities that kind of scaffolded and built forward for that individual.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Okay, finally, and I think that this becomes really crucial, this idea of redesigning systems is one of the things that we saw. This is where it began to really shift, and I’ll talk about that in a second, from the idea of this individual culture broker as a person embodying a particular role or a cultural broker as embodied in a person, to this idea of cultural brokering or systems brokering as an activity, as a verb. This really took the form of behind-the-scenes work across departments. What was important about that, it was especially the departments that were not considered related to family engagement. It was this behind-the-scenes work to reshape how the system interacts with families. And so, it had to do with decision-making processes about… It could have been about grading or attendance policies, all different kinds of things. In one case, it was about hiring and a hiring decision.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
These are conversations that unfold with HR and finance and budgeting. For instance, the leader that I mentioned just a minute ago, the district needed to figure out how to hire him while he grew up in a refugee camp and didn’t have an advanced degree. So they had to reorient or reshape the system so that it would actually allow for him to get resource to get paid even though he didn’t have an advanced degree. This could take the form of professional development for educators and leaders. A number of the organizations and parent organizers that I work with have developed professional development for the educators and leaders in their systems. The folks who are on the systems side play an incredibly crucial role in opening those possibilities. And then systems-based co-design of particular focused initiatives. You can read more about that at the end of my book.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I think one of the things are just a forecast for you. Many of these ideas and resources are not only in my book but there are a number of websites that have different tools related to that. So I think Fred maybe is going to share some of those. There’s a couple of websites where we have research briefs and other kinds of tools. One of them is the Equitable Parent-School Collaboration website, and the other is the Family Leadership Design Collaborative. So if you’re interested in learning more about co-design, especially systems-based co-design, we have started offering institutes. We offered our first one this past summer with eight different teams from across the country. You can get on our mailing list to find out more about the Family Leadership Design Collaborative and our co-design institutes.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
But the big takeaway that I alluded to a minute ago is just this idea of moving from cultural brokers who’ve been positioned by their systems to assimilate families in the school-centric agendas towards thinking about how might we all, no matter what the name of our role is, even if it’s not explicitly supposed to be like, “Your job is to engage families,” to engage in this kind of systemic brokering that’s really about transforming power and building reciprocity and agency.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
All right, I’m going to conclude. We have some time for questions and answers. I can see that there are already a few in there. Thank you very much for taking your time to be with me today and to be walking down this long, bumpy, challenging but ultimately powerful road towards equitable collaborations and towards more just schools.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
All right. I’m going to questions and answers.

Sherri Wilson:
Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Ishimaru. It is really powerful and just incredibly helpful as we think about how we emerge from the tail end of this pandemic which we’ll hopefully reach soon. I don’t know if we’re there yet. But it’s important to start thinking about how can we take the experiences we’ve had and grow from there and try and transform some of our systems that haven’t been equitable in the past. So we do have a few questions I’m really to read it. As you guys are listening to these questions, if you have others, feel free to add those to the Q&A box as well. First up, here’s an anonymous question. “Were the cultural brokers hired by schools, or where they hired out from family organizations? Where was the collaboration with families of different cultural backgrounds in schools?”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Yeah. Actually, in this particular industry that I’m referring to, it was both. We had two school districts and one was a community-based organization. I noticed somebody else was asking the titles. I don’t have them in front of me, but at least one of the title was family liaisons, was from one of the school districts. At least one of the community-based organization called them family allies or something like that. Some of the titles have changed over time, but there’s a variety of different iterations on that. But when you look at what it is that they are being asked to do, it’s often to support and engage families, help them to support learning ultimately of their children.

Sherri Wilson:
Here’s one from Jessica. She said, “How can schools or individual teachers actively bring parent voice in for meaningful decision-making?”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
That’s hard, it’s challenging. So just to say, one of the ways that I think our dominant model is premised on things like the PTA and on committees. And so, often what happens is, again, even though these people aren’t necessarily in formal roles in the way that the family liaisons are, they’re also tokenized in these. So it might be like, “Here’s a committee. We need two parents to be on this committee.” I’m thinking about this now. One of the Family Leadership Design Collaborative groups is in Salt Lake City, Utah, and they have something called school community councils. They’re budget decision-making councils, and they are intended for families to have a voice in how the money gets spent, but they are very much sort of rubber stamp. They have been experienced by many parents, especially those who are not white, not native English speakers, experienced them as kind of rubber stamp situations where they’re asked to then come in and then, “Here sign this. We’ve already decided what’s going to happen here, and we just need you to sign this.”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Or they experience in there is like they don’t know what’s going on because we’re using Robert’s rules of order. That happens a lot in PTA meetings as well. We have very rigid ways of approaching process in schools, formal processes. So that’s why we have developed this idea of solidarity-driven co-design. You can think about that in sort of little C co-design ways and then also like big C co-design. So if you’re really interested in a big C co-design, I would say get involved, find out about co-design. There’s some resources and tools both in the book and on the websites that I shared.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
But it’s also really about thinking about how do you begin with the families who have been systematically marginalized and excluded from those conversations and really starting there. So those learning circles that those principals are doing are really a good way to do that. On the one hand, you can say, “Okay, well, what’s a really key decision that we have to figure out this year at the school level or a district level?” I have an example in the book of a principal supervisor who knew that they had to hire a new principal. This school had a really negative experience with those processes. So he started by partnering with someone else who was more trusted in that community and asking them like, “Let’s have some meetings and talk about what are your priorities, what didn’t go well in the past? What needs to go differently not just in terms of who we want as a principal, but the process we might need?” And so they then evolved out of that and came up with… They had a large group conversation, and they had group of 10 families. They had a group of 10 students, had group of 10 staff that were representative of the demographics of that school. Each of them came up with their own questions. They interviewed the candidates and then made their own recommendations and then came together.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Fortunately, in that case, it was consensus. The district supervisor said, “Well, if I’d really thought about it, I probably would have made the same choice myself.” But something really different emerged as a result of this kind of process because then he actually had a couple of those parents reach out to the school board and say, “Wow, this was so different than anything I’ve ever experienced.” It reshaped the way that those folks thought about the role that they might be able to take in the consequential decisions in their school.

Sherri Wilson:
Wow, that’s awesome. Here’s a question from Jovonia, and I apologize Jovonia if I’m saying that wrong, “Do you have any just schools models that are doing well?”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I guess I always struggled with this question because I think that it’s… No, there’s no school that’s made it because this is an ongoing journey, right? There are definitely places and spaces and schools where these kinds of things are unfolding, and that’s, I guess, why I call them promising practices. Even in this study that I did, I just wanted to acknowledge that the promising practices didn’t comprise the primary form of practice in those spaces. If you go onto our website, though, you’ll see some of the organizations and systems where folks are doing some of this work right now. There’s an organization I work with called Supporting Partnerships in Education and Beyond, and there’s some really interesting stuff going on in terms of families and educators coming together in some of the South King County Districts in the Seattle area.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
One of the chapters actually features the Salem/Kaiser Coalition for Equality. Some of that work that I’m more familiar with is earlier. I know they’ve also done some things around professional development for educators and have done a lot of work around young people and the English language learning systems and approaches. There are organizing groups, and I see somebody is from Los Angeles, so Condray is doing some work to really disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. They’re an organizing group, but in the Family Leadership Design Collaborative, they’ve also leaned into a number of co-design practices as well.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
You can find these kinds of practices. Frankly, often, we’re coming out of community-based organizations. Sometimes it’s just a matter of looking around and really taking the time to understand what folks are trying to do. Because I think often our formal systems think of partnerships and they think, “What can we get out of this? What service can we provide to our students?” It’s not to say that they aren’t providing important services or that isn’t an important way of approaching partnerships. It’s not the only way to approach this partnership. Especially some of these culturally specific grassroots organizations can be incredible resources and partners.

Sherri Wilson:
Here’s a question from my friend, Cynthia Grace. She says, “What happens when the circle of trust is broken with the lack of relevant actions to create measurable change as promised by the local education agency, the district administration, or the school staff? This happens quite often. Can you suggest some corrective solutions?”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Yeah. That happens all the time. Thank you for just saying that. I think that’s one of the dangers, frankly, of co-design is that people get excited about the idea and they go and they’re like, “Okay, let’s change everything, everywhere, all at once.” They can get in trouble because we can’t make promises like that. Our systems are very resistant to change. So one of the things that I really encourage people to do is to start small. Start small and start where you can… What’s part of your everyday responsibility and work? And what’s something you can shift within that? And start with yourself and your own leadership practice.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
I think the other thing that can be antidote to that is earlier on in some of the co-design work I did, I feel like I made the mistake of not bringing along community-based organizations in the process. And so when it ended, when I had just been working within the district, when everybody turned over and there was a new regime and a new everything, those parents didn’t have an external base of support to continue on in the work. Sometimes it’s even just like the churn of systems that’s not anybody’s intentional, like they didn’t want to do the work, but just like all the people who were the champions for it left their roles or left their positions. And so, really walking with a community-based organization or several organizations in that work. Those organizations stay in those communities, they’re not going to turn over. Yes, maybe some of their staff will turn over, but they don’t turn over, and they are the ones who can support and sustain the platform to enable families and young people to stay in these relationships and to build collective power over time to make a change.

Sherri Wilson:
I think we have time for maybe one more question. There are quite a few in the queue, so we’ll try and answer as many of these as we can and send them out to you when we send the link to the recording. But let’s take one more from my colleague, Reyna Hernandez. Reyna would like to know if you have any recommendations, whether competencies or strategies, for building the capacity of educators and people in the educational system.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Ooh, that’s a good question. It’s funny because one of the things I was… I got invited to the White House, I think, it was 2014 or something like that, and we had an audience with Arne Duncan. They said, “Who wants to ask questions?” I didn’t know I was going to do this, but some people were saying, “Well, colleges and universities are doing a terrible job of developing the teachers and educators we need.” And there was a bit of a narrative going on. It’s like, “Well, if only the colleges and universities would get it together to train teachers and leaders better, we wouldn’t have this problem anymore.” I was like, “Okay, well, now I have to stand up and say, ‘Yes, we can do a better job, for sure, I will definitely own that. And that’s not the only thing we need.'” I said, “The standards that we have for engaging families in terms of educator practice and leadership practice are incredibly weak levers for change.” And then I’m sure they crossed me off the list. “Oh my God, don’t invite her back.”

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
But I do really think that that’s part of a really important issue that we have to attend to. I think that a number of states actually, and I was involved in a recent effort in Washington state. I know that Oregon has been developing these standards. I know that… What is the other? Anyway, there’s a couple of other states that have pretty strong emerging standards around engaging families. They need to get into the educator and leadership standards though, I think, to really have some legs. Obviously, I think a lot of people are orienting towards Karen Mapp’s work and the dual capacity framework. That can be a useful lever as well. I think that as we think about there are groups out there, national groups that are organizing groups that are bringing parent leadership together, that’s increasingly something that they’re pressing on is trying to think about what might it look like for us to have stronger standards for engaging families?

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
So I would encourage folks to keep pushing on those, to look to some of the national parent leadership organizations that have put out, “Here’s what we need to see,” because that’s really where you can get real legs there. And then there are definitely a few states, I think. I think that the Washington one is on its way. I’m not going to say it’s exemplary or anything, but I was really encouraged that these kinds of conversations and centering issues of educational injustice, and reckoning with these long histories was a central part of that conversation.

Sherri Wilson:
Yeah, and coincidentally, my colleague, Reyna, posted a link to the State of the State’s report in the chatbox, which has information about each state standards for educator and principal preparation. So there’s a link to that if you want to get a bird’s-eye view of what each state requires. And with that, I’m going to ask Fred to show the link or share the link to the book. Dr. Ishimaru’s book is available. If you haven’t read it yet, we strongly encourage you to read through it. There’s so much more that we didn’t have time to get through today. It is a really valuable tool for you in creating just schools in your own communities.

Sherri Wilson:
So Fred, if you want to pop that up, everyone can see that link. And also, we want to remind everyone to take the survey. We have a survey for you because this workshop was sponsored by the Center for Active Family Engagement… I’m sorry, the Collaborative Action for Family engagement, CAFE, out of the mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium. Their work is really important. We want to make sure that we collect enough data as we can to show the impact of these types of webinars. And also, we want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make these webinars useful for you. And so, your feedback really helps us as we think about that.

Sherri Wilson:
And finally, I want to say a huge, huge thank you to Dr. Ishimaru. This has been an incredible webinar. I’ve learned a lot, and I feel like many of our participants did as well. I hope all of you join me in signing up for her newsletter. And thank you again for presenting today.

Dr. Ann Ishimaru:
Thank you so much.

Sherri Wilson:
You guys, have a wonderful day, stay safe out there, and we will see you at the next webinar. Take care.