AJE Feature | Power Dynamics and Positioning in Home Visits by Judy Paulick, Soyoung Park, and Ariel Cornett.

The full-length American Journal of Education article by Paulick, Park, & Cornett can be accessed here.

Connections between homes and elementary schools are vital for students, families, and teachers alike. When teachers understand students’ and families’ cultures, they can engage in culturally responsive teaching; when children and families feel seen and heard, they are more likely to engage with schools. Actively nurturing these connections may be particularly important for culturally and linguistically marginalized students and their culturally and linguistically dominant teachers, since cross-cultural relationships can be challenging, fraught, and steeped in oppressive power differentials. A potentially promising practice for developing those connections is relationship-building, asset-framed home visits. But only if home visiting is enacted in ways that promote power-sharing, collaboration, and equity.

Most family engagement programs and strategies have the goal of teaching families the norms and content of schools and classrooms. Ideally, home visits serve a different purpose: Home visits have the potential to center families and situate teachers as learners. If home visits simply center teachers within families’ homes, they have missed their potential. Moreover, if teachers are approaching home visits with deficit lenses and unexplored biases, home visits may actually do damage.

This exploratory descriptive study aimed to understand the power dynamics in home visits as they are currently enacted. We asked: In what ways are traditional power positions between teachers and marginalized families reinforced and disrupted during home visits?

We used positioning theory as the conceptual framework for this study. This allowed us to examine who was positioning/being positioned in home visiting interactions, what was the content of the interaction, and what was the language of the interaction. Positioning theory highlights the dynamism of interactions, allowing us insight into the teacher or caregiver moves that shifted the power dynamics of the interactions. It made visible who took, gave, and yielded power so we could see how traditional positions that reinforce schools’ norms and oppress families were being reinforced or upended.

We studied one cycle of home visiting in each of two schools, Ridge Elementary and Grove Elementary, in two regions of the U.S. In both schools, the student population was overwhelmingly multilingual, lower income, and students of Color. The Ridge teachers were mostly White and monolingual English speakers, while the Grove teachers represented more cultural and linguistic diversity. Our team of researchers observed 25 home visits (12 at Ridge and 13 at Grove), taking thick, detailed narrative notes immediately after each visit. The visits averaged 25 minutes apiece and the child/student was present for nearly all of the visits. Two educators (the child’s primary teacher and a support staff) participated in each home visit. Often, siblings and family members in addition to the primary caregivers were also present. It is important to note that all of the teachers in both sites expressed that relationship-building was the primary aim of the visits.

We analyzed the narrative notes using deductive and inductive coding, refining the codes through a process of axial coding. Themes emerged around how teachers and families upheld and upended problematic power structures. First, we found that the home visits were overwhelmingly similar to each other, particularly within each of the school sites. During the Ridge visits, the teachers entered the homes and were seated. They would ask the family about their day, share information about the school and/or classroom, and ask if the family had questions. After this exchange, they would excuse themselves to their next visit. The Grove visits were somewhat different, in part because most of them were second visits with the families. The teachers would enter the home and be seated. They might ask briefly how the family was doing, and then they would move quickly to describing the child’s progress. The fifth-grade teachers would ask about the family’s plans for middle school for the child; all teachers would ask if the family had any questions. Once the teachers responded to the families’ questions (often there were many), the teachers would wrap up the meeting.

This typical script predominated in the visits, positioning the teachers as experts and the families as learners, even in their own homes. Overwhelmingly, the teachers were friendly and helpful, and the families were receptive. Teachers engaged the families and children in discussions that were almost exclusively school focused. The language of the Ridge visits was either English or Spanish, depending on the teachers’ read of the family, and the Grove visits were in English.

While these typical scripts predominated, there were moments in our field notes that indicated possibilities for hierarchical power dynamics to be shifted during home visits. For example, in three of the visits, the fathers took charge and shared information that they wanted the teachers to know (about their home, their values, and their child’s multilingualism). In two of the visits, mothers did the same, talking about their child’s assets and their own contributions to their children’s education. Another example of shifting the power dynamics was evident in one teacher pairs’ open-ended questions. Additionally, the Grove teachers often honored the home language by conducting the visit in that language. Ridge teachers, when they honored the home language, did it in more subtle ways – they asked the word for something, used a word or greeting in the home language, utilized translation software, or employed a language broker in the home.

This study serves as a warning that home visits do not inherently disrupt a problematic status quo. In fact, even home visiting that is explicitly framed as relationship-building by the organizers and the teachers can reinforce hierarchical power dynamics between schools and families. This indicates that teachers need training and support to engage in home visits productively. Of note, this problematic, typical script predominated regardless of whether the teachers had marginalized cultural and linguistic identities in common with families and whether the home visit was conducted in the home language or in English: Teachers held the power, and they asserted and maintained it; marginalized families were positioned as the learners.

Ideally, home visiting includes a number of features that differentiate it from parent-teacher conferences and creates spaces for power-shifting. First of all, the meetings are in a space that is comfortable for the families. While having relative strangers in one’s home may evoke feelings of discomfort, the familiarity of the space for the families and unfamiliarity of the space for the teachers has the potential to redistribute power. Ideally, also, home visits are in the family’s home language or at the very least honor the home language and maximize opportunities for translation. Furthermore, home visiting has the potential for the teachers to focus on learning about the families—their assets and experiences—rather than on schools and classrooms. We saw moments of “disruption” across our visits—parents taking charge or teachers actively handing the reigns to families—but ideally home visits are comprised almost entirely of family-focused and family-centered discussions.

A major limitation of this work is that we did not have access to the perspectives of the families themselves beyond what was recalled and recorded by the researchers. We need to know what families’ experience is of home visiting. This need for families’ voices and perspectives in future home visiting research and training is vital.

Home visiting is a potentially promising practice with implications for family engagement in schools, students’ academic and socio-emotional outcomes, teachers’ skill as educators, and teachers’ job satisfaction. Theorists have hypothesized that home visits may support collaborative relationship building and culturally sustaining teaching. This study provides evidence, however, that home visits do not, in and of themselves, necessarily lead to an equitable power space. We call for home visiting at the intersection of funds of knowledge and relationship-building: Home visiting must intentionally focus on both asset-framing and relationships, and teachers must be clear on both the purpose of the visits and strategies for achieving that purpose. Those strategies include developing the dispositions necessary to reposition themselves as learners and families as information holders. Strategies might also include asking open-ended questions, honoring the home language, and intentionally involving fathers in home visits.

Teachers likely require support in developing the awareness (of themselves and others) and the openness to listen and to learn how and why to reposition themselves as learners in families’ homes. While home visiting is a potentially promising practice, we provide evidence that it requires considerable work if it is to meet that potential.