Home–school connection framework: Elevating multilingual familial engagement capital to build bridges

Abstract

School readiness research points to familial assets as tools for enriching home–literacy and home–school partnerships. This research informs an urgent call for reimagining educator preparedness relative to bridging students' lived experiences at home and school. Developing a multidimensional approach to effectively partnering with multilingual families that centers families as knowledge holders has potential to interrupt persistent opportunity gaps for ethnoracially and linguistically diverse learners. This conceptual paper presents a reconceptualizing of educator preparedness through what we call a home–school connection framework. This framework situates seven principal tenets—asset‐based culturally sustaining foundations, bilingual and bicultural mirrors, authentic cariño (Curry, 2021; Kwon, 2020; Martínez‐Álvarez, 2020; Valenzuela, 1999), reciprocal collaboration, anti‐bias awareness, community valuing of multicultural literature, and familial capital. This framework is applied in practice across each tenet. Preliminary findings suggest the importance of shifting dispositional stance away from educators serving families and toward educators purposefully partnering with families honoring familial engagement capital to inform multilingual multiliteracies in educational spaces.