Engaging Families: Connecting Home and School Literacy Communities » (New Edition)

Betty Shockley has been a researcher since 1989, when she began the longitudinal study that became Engaging Children (Heinemann, 1993). She has published numerous essays and articles, presented at state and national conferences, and conducted workshops with teachers. Shockley is an active researcher with the National Reading Research Center at the University of Georgia, where she serves as the director of the School Research Consortium.

Barbara Michalove, along with co-researchers Betty Shockley and JoBeth Allen, began the longitudinal study that became Engaging Children, (Heinemann, 1993), in 1989. Over the course of their partnership, they have published numerous essays and articles, presented at state and national conferences, and conducted workshops with teachers. Michalove conducts teacher research in her own whole language classroom in Athens, Georgia. She is an active researcher with the National Reading Research Center at the University of Georgia.

JoBeth Allen teaches in the language education department at the University of Georgia. She is particularly interested in exploring the intersection of progressive education and democratic pedagogy, and the implications for students who struggle as readers and writers.

After four years of studying "the students [they] worried about most," Betty Shockley, Barbara Michalove, and JoBeth Allen began to consider the importance of children's literacy experiences outside of school. While their students talked regularly about home literacy events, there was no real link between home and school: no way to learn what families valued and practiced, no way to communicate how their children were becoming literate in school.

Engaging Families details how these teachers and the students' families developed respected partnerships in the teaching/learning process. The authors share what they learned about creating an extended literacy community, identifying the primary themes in literacy development and suggesting parallel practices to reinforce them. But Engaging Families is not a prescriptive text, it is a description of one particular effort, featuring actual voices of children and parents.