Coteaching for parent-school-community engagement: seen through the four resources model.

Willis, Linda-Dianne

This paper reflects on a 2008 project in which a teacher invited two parents (1) of students in his class to coteach with him on the topic of War and Refugees (Willis, 2013). Although the project occurred in a Year eight context, it has utility for all teachers in showing how the four resources model (FRM) (Freebody & Luke, 1990) of language and literacy teaching and learning may provide a viewing platform for seeing the benefits and potential of coteaching for parent-school-community engagement. For decades, governments nationally and internationally have actively supported parent -school-community involvement initiatives. In Australia, these include the establishment in 2008 of The Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau and its recent publication, Parental engagement in learning and schooling: Lessons from research (Emerson, Fear, Fox, & Sanders, 2012). These initiatives derive from strong, consistent research evidence that parent involvement in schools not only benefits students, teachers, and schools but also has wide-ranging implications for education reform, employers and communities, and ultimately Australia's future economic prosperity. These initiatives also continue to inform the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) in identifying ways teachers and school leaders can generate and sustain professional engagement with colleagues, parents, and the community to meet new national teaching standards.

Despite the research evidence and concomitant systemic imperatives that have helped teachers recognise what they have known intuitively about the importance of parent engagement in their children's education, teachers also know it is difficult to enact. Hence, immersion in language and literacy learning through reading and writing activities and games at school and home, continues to provide an effective channel for primary school teachers to encourage parent involvement in their children's education, but may not constitute engagement. The challenge involves first having a clear idea of what engagement actually means.

This is made more difficult because the term is often used interchangeably with others including: involvement, participation, partnership, cooperation and collaboration. One way to think of engagement is using an analogy of a car's gears. When the gears engage, forward motion is possible. For teachers to engage with parents, implies that both are integral and essential to the action. Engagement can therefore challenge teachers to reconceptualise their interactions and relationships with parents to recognise parents' vast knowledge of children, of teaching and learning, and that all parents have strengths (Pushor, 2013).

The cotaught War and Refugees project exemplifies engagement. Coteaching is when two or more individuals decide to purposefully combine their knowledge, skills, experiences and expertise to further teaching and learning outcomes. In this project, two parents volunteered at the teacher's invitation to coteach his class. The teacher and parents met several times before introducing the topic to the students, then met each week for a term to work in the classroom and afterward to discuss what happened, ways to improve and what to do next. These discussions were set up so that the teacher and parents adopted respectful and inclusive practices such as active listening, continually inviting each one to participate, valuing all ideas and suggestions, and seeing each one's contributions as valuable. Hence, coteaching the topic saw the teacher's knowledge of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment become entwined with the parents' knowledge of their children, the class, the school and community, their professional worlds, and education and the world generally.

Their mutual work led the teacher and parents to ask the students to take on various roles as war-zone workers for a non-government aid organisation (NGO). In turn, the students produced a range of text types for different audiences. These are set out in Table 1 below:

The different texts were presented by the students in their project roles at a showcase evening to all of their parents at the end of the project.

Freebody and Luke's (1990) FRM offers a vantage point for seeing how coteaching built student language and literacy competencies by facilitating parent-school-community engagement throughout the project. According to the FRM, literacy learners play four roles: code breaker, meaning maker, text user and text analyst. As code breakers, students build their resources for decoding texts. During meaning-making, students draw on their past knowledge and experiences to enhance their capacity for participating in texts. As text users, students develop competence for understanding the purpose of different texts. And as text analysts, they draw on their knowledge of different social contexts to build their resources for critiquing and transforming texts. Although each is necessary, no one role is sufficient for building student literacy competency: all four roles need to be thought of non-hierarchically and as operating together at all stages of student language and literacy development.

In reflecting on the project, the model helps to show how the teacher and parents developed the students' four sets of resources. During planning, the coteachers considered different opportunities and activities to provide the students with high-quality teaching and learning experiences. Coteaching multiplied the possibilities, since the arrangement with the parents expanded the networks of relationships and acquaintances usually available to the teacher. This led to a number of activities including one classroom visit by a Federal Member of Parliament (MP) and another by a teenage refugee accompanied by a refugee advocate. As well, a fieldtrip to a simulated refugee camp was organised. Although all of these experiences encouraged all four resources, Table 2 shows how each one built student literacy capacities in particular ways. Together the experiences allowed the students to play all four literacy-learner roles and enabled the teacher and parents to provide a comprehensive, balanced approach to literacy teaching and learning in the classroom.

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Consistent with the FRM, as the students built their language and literacy resources, so did the teacher and parents. In turn, they facilitated the students' literacy learning and development. This ability to assist the students to complete their project tasks was not just because the teacher and parents were present in the classroom and at different activities where they experienced learning together. It was also because they could remind the students of the different sets of resources they had built and could help them make purposeful connections among all four.

This example of a teacher and two parents who entered into a coteaching arrangement to teach the topic of War and Refugees illustrates engagement. Not only did the teacher engage with the parents, they, together with the students, in turn engaged with the community. Using the FRM in this paper brings into focus the benefits and possibilities of coteaching for parent-school-community engagement to enhance students' language and literacy learning and development.

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Note

(1.) The meaning of, 'parent', may be best understood as a verb rather than a noun to reflect a relationship of primary care and responsibility by a biological parent or grandparent, guardian, or caregiver for a child's well-being.

References

Emerson, L., Fear. J., Fox, S., & Sanders, E. (2012). Parental engagement in learning and schooling: Lessons from research. A report by the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY) for the Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau: Canberra.

Freebody, P., & Luke, A. (1990). Literacies programs: Debates and demands in cultural context. Prospect: Australian Journal of TESOL, 5 (7), 7-16.

Pushor, D. (2013). Portals of promise: Transforming beliefs and practices through a curriculum of parents. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Willis, L.-D. (2013). Parent-teacher engagement: A coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing approach. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Linda Willis coordinates The University of Queensland's Master of Teaching (Primary) program. She teaches English and literacy in undergraduate and post-graduate teacher-education programs. Email: l.willis@uq.edu.au

Table 1: Student roles, tasks and text types for the War
and Refugees topic

Student project       Group tasks             Text types
roles

Project Officers      Grant application for   information and
                        the school's            expository texts
                        parents                 detailing the NGO
                                                and its funding
                                                needs
Promotions Officers   Advertising campaign    persuasive texts
                        for the school and      promoting the NGO's
                        general community       work and seeking
                                                to attract overseas
                                                workers
Education Officers    Education pack for      information and
                        Nigerian aid            procedural texts
                        workers                 for managing
                                                infectious diseases
Public Awareness      Panel of experts for    expository and
  Officers              a national              discussion texts
                        television audience     highlighting the
                                                moral dilemmas
                                                surrounding the
                                                refugee issue in
                                                Australia

Table 2: Students built their resources playing
different literacy roles

Activity       Literacy role              Resources encouraged

Federal        Code breaking resources    Students heard these
  Member of      were encouraged            words and terms
  Parliament     through: introduction      in context, building
                 of new vocabulary, key     their metalanguage
                 terms and acronyms         for subsequent class
                 about the topic:           discussions and text
               * displaced people           construction.
               * illegal immigrant
               * asylum seeker
               * UNHCR = United
                 Nations Human Rights
                 Commission
               * PPV = permanent
                 protection visa

Teenage        Meaning making resources   The students made links
  refugee        were promoted as           with their prior
                 the students listened      knowledge about the
                 to the refugee's story     topic. This included
                 of how his father was      knowledge gained from
                 forced to flee             reading their class
                 Afghanistan and lived      text, Boy Overboard.
                 for six years in           The students built
                 Australia's Woomera        impressions about
                 Detention Centre.          the problems and
                 The students also          impacts of war and
                 gained insights into       developed empathy
                 life in Afghanistan        for others in similar
                 and living in              circumstances.
                 fear of the Taliban.

Simulated      Text using resources       The students gained
  refugee        were encouraged as the     knowledge about
  camp           students encountered       different text
  fieldtrip      a range of text types      types and the
                 that informed them         ways they are used in
                 about diseases,            different contexts and
                 provided data about        for different purposes.
                 refugee hotspots,          They later interacted
                 highlighted the            with one another about
                 plight of refugees         the suitability of these
                 and requested support      texts for their purposes
                 for overseas aid           as project officers.
                 efforts.

Refugee        Text analyst resources     The students were enabled
  advocate       were built as the          to recognise and
                 students reflected         describe the advocate's
                 on the advocate's          views on refugees and
                 perspectives about         how his language choices
                 refugee treatment in       positioned them.
                 Australia.                They compared his bias
                                            to that of the MP