September 2024

Since I began teaching in the early 1990s, I have had the honor of working with many families, include Latine immigrants of disabled youth.* As a bilingual education and bilingual special education teacher, I quickly learned that collaborating with families led to better planning, improved lesson plans, and an overall positive learning environment for my students. This family-centered orientation to my teaching and pedagogy eventually led me to research within higher education through my master and doctoral degrees. With expertise in bilingual special education, I have had the privilege to work with and learn from many families and students whose multifaceted, dynamic, and unique lived experiences have informed my scholarship today.

My work attempts to dismantle negative master narratives rooted in dominant culture that impact disabled youth and their families at the intersections of race, ethnicity, language and other identities of difference. As a teacher educator, I use a Family as Faculty approach – with connections to healthcare field – that positions families of disabled youth as leaders in my special education courses. Family Leaders are experts of their children and share epistemic wisdom through personal narratives and lived experiences. As co-instructors, Family Leaders co-plan, lead, and facilitate course instruction to prepare preservice special education teachers (i.e., undergraduate or graduate students) in becoming more critically and culturally responsive teachers as well as strong disability advocates.

At the local level, collaborating with schools and community partners is key to the success of Family as Faculty (FAF). In essence, I have collaborated with non-profit family advocacy institutions (e.g., Down Syndrome Indiana), parent centers (e.g., INSOURCE), community centers (e.g., John Boner Neighborhood Center), and schools (e.g., Brookside Elementary School in Indianapolis Public School district). Through community-engaged partnerships, Family as Faculty projects (from 2016-present) have directly impacted over 150 preservice teachers and over 80 families. FAF research has demonstrated that preservice special education teachers (PSETs) learn family-centered strategies from Family Leaders that lead to more critically conscious and culturally responsive practices, whether in interpersonal interactions with families or when applied to teaching.

For the past two years, at the national level, I have been involved with the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement (NAFSCE), the first membership association focused solely on advancing family, school, and community engagement. I was a member of one of nine collaboratives of education preparation programs and partnerships to participate in NAFSCE’s Family Engagement Educator Preparation Innovation Project (FEEPIP). As the Principal Investigator of a proposal called, “Family as Faculty as an Infrastructure to Engage Pre-Admission Teacher Candidates in Family-Driven STEM Learning,” I, along with co-PIs, Dr. Jeremy Price and Dr. Ted Hall, as well as other important contributors, Dr. Brooke Moreland, Dr. Amy Wechter-Versaw, Akaash Arora, Maxim Bulanov, and A. J. Knoors, formed CEISL, The Collaborative for Equitable and Inclusive STEM Learning. Through this project we collaborated with several partners and created a Neighborhood Caucus consisting of Indianapolis Public School (IPS) family and community members (Black/African American, Latine, White). The Neighborhood Caucus and Family Leaders from Down Syndrome Indiana co-facilitated STEM Learning Workshops with CEISL, along with other activities, to support preservice teacher candidates in learning how to establish respectful, trusting relationships with multiply-marginalized families. Through these relationships and through learning about STEM practices used by families in the home, preservice teacher candidates came away with the following takeaways: (a) working with families helped them understand where families came from; (b) families assisted them in opening their world view; (c) dialoguing with families made them realize a need for change on multiple levels; (d) collaborating with families supported a better approach to teaching; and (e) realizing the importance of family-teacher/school partnerships supported them in meeting the needs of all students.

This work has been shared nationally at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Conference, and at the National Family Engagement Summit. Several artifacts associated with this work and other CEISL research related to family-school-community partnerships have been published, including a brief directly related to this Family as Faculty project.

I absolutely appreciate how the Family as Faculty approach disrupts uneven power relations. When multiply-marginalized family members share their empowering narratives and lived experiences with future (and current) educators, there is always a tangible momentum toward concrete, actionable change. Family members as educational leaders and experts have a tremendous potential to transform systems and practices that have (re)produced harm and oppression for many marginalized students with intersectional identities, such as disabled youth of Color.

When not engaged in research or other work-related responsibilities, I love cooking and eating with my family. Now that my children are older, their palates are more sophisticated. From tacos to tapas, we relish the food we share and enjoy the time we have together.

As described earlier, the students I teach are our future educators! Therefore, creating opportunities for them to become compassionate, critical thinking agents of change has been a constant goal for me as a teacher educator. For this reason, I learned about, adopted, and adapted a Family as Faculty approach to bring innovation to the ways that students engage personally and professionally with families.

Community members, namely families of disabled youth of Color, are centered in every aspect of my scholarship, whether teaching, research or service. I chose to go into higher education as a teacher educator because of the families I worked with and learned from. Honoring their cultural wealth, wisdom, and ways of knowing within curriculum and instruction at every level in education is a necessary step in transforming the ways we educate our children. For this reason, community members are key co-collaborators in all of my research projects.

I am currently working on a book that combines family centered approaches and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). UDL focuses on how students learn when learning and teaching are optimized through design principles customized and adjusted to meet individual needs.