Rural multilingual family engagement: Review of research and model of engagement

Abstract

Rural teachers and educators are increasingly called upon to build partnerships with families who use languages other than English in the home (US DOE, 2016). This is equally true for rural schools, where the number of multilingual families is small, and the language and cultural backgrounds of students differs from those of school. This article reviews the research on parental involvement and three common models of parental involvement. In this article, I propose a revised conceptual model for teachers and educators for rural multilingual family engagement. This article calls for increasingly refined research that addresses the sociohistorical backgrounds of families and the current sociopolitical context of multilingual family engagement. Ultimately, rural multilingual family engagement is predicated on differentiated practices, relational trust between educators and families, and attention to geospatial variation.