Family Involvement in Education.

This article examines a collaborative practice-based research project. It recounts the experiences of a kindergarten teacher as she implemented a program to increase family involvement in education. The text is based on classroom documents, parent meetings, and parent interviews. The setting for the narrative is a Basic School, a type of school founded on the vision of Ernest Boyer that positions parents as a child's first and most important teachers. To facilitate parent participation, the teacher reviewed the literature on family involvement and then chose a strategy that would lead to a genuine collaboration between home and school and thus bring families closer to their children's education. The report describes the tactics the teacher used to learn more about the children and their families and what these families viewed as priorities. It discusses her decision to use the activity-based assessment (ABA) inventory to guide conversations about what families wanted their children to learn and how the ABA served as the organizing principle for a series of family meetings. The document evaluates these efforts to involve family members in their children's education and the decision to use practice-based research to analyze these efforts. It details the extent of involvement and the subsequent results. (Contains 12 references.) (RJM)