Inclusive Approaches to Parent Engagement for Young English Language Learners and Their Families

Parent involvement today is accepted in educational circles and across most communities as necessary for student success. Studies have shown that engaged and active parent involvement in the schooling of children heightens a sense of belonging and improves children’s academic and behavioral performance. However, the literature also depicts that schools ’ conception, design, and implementation of parent involvement programs can defeat their purposes, as the traditional unidirectional pro-gram design disenfranchises parents from nontraditional backgrounds (i.e., other than White, educated middle class). For this reason, scholars have argued for collaborative parent involvement programs for minority students and English language learners ’ (ELLs) families to improve their academic success. Despite the trend toward collaboration, students’ home languages and culture continue to be seen as a liability in the learning process; this sentiment has created a backlash position that claims children have a linguistic (human) right to retain their language, even when learning in school. Schecter and Cummins (2003) used the term “inclusive ” as an alterna-tive to these arguments, since “it highlights the interests of the entire society rather than those of a particular minority group and, in so doing, transcends the ‘us ’ versus ‘them ’ mentality that characterizes much of the debate ” on ELLs in public schools (p. 5). In the introduction of Inclusive Pedagogy, Verplaetse and Migliacci (2008) listed the tenets of inclusiv