Reflections and Directions on Research Related to Family– Community Involvement in Schooling

Abstract

S. Redding noted the many challenges facing research and researchers in family-school-community involvement, and he presented a call to “rally the troops ” to respond to a series of concerns. The issue of control over defin-ing the role of schools should be a shared enterprise among the family, the school, and the community, with the individual child as the center. This pa-per presents reflections on past developments providing the background and reasoning for contemporary practice of family-school involvement across America. The paper provides analyses of research and thought in order to present four recommendations for future directions in development and re-search for family-school-community involvement programs. The first two recommendations focus on explicitly incorporating family-community involve-ment knowledge, skills, and values into preservice teacher and administrator licensing programs and studying the resulting effects on aspects of these pro-grams. These recommendations are crucial to implementation of family and community involvement practices as the teacher and the principal serve as key agents for positive family and community involvement in schools. The third recommendation promotes studying the effects of family involvement in character/civic education on student outcomes. The fourth recommendation encourages research on the effects of tying community organizations, includ-ing health and social agencies, with the school. Each of these recommendations should serve to point out areas where family-school-community involvement research would be both timely and fruitful.

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