| This dissertation explores the ways that community resources can be engaged to build more effective relationships between schools and families. By exploring the strategies of one successful community organizing group in connecting families with local schools, this study seeks to address the gaps in communication, experience, and culture that exist between many urban schools and the communities they serve. Based in Chicago's northwest side, the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) has organized parents as leaders, increasing their participation in schools. Through this participation, parents also become connected to the broader issues of community life and civic participation.;Data reveal that LSNA's Parent Mentor program presents us with a three-part model that can be broadly applicable to school. The ecology of parent engagement describes parent engagement as a process of Induction, Integration, and Investment. Through their school participation, parents can be inducted into previously unfamiliar environments to support their children as well as their own understanding of schools. Through a program that focuses on connecting parents to teachers and other parents in the school, parents become integrated into schools as key actors and role models. Finally, by developing parents as leaders rather than as passive participants in school-determined initiatives, parent engagement is seen as an investment in schools and the broader community. Compared to more traditional models of parent involvement, LSNA's model for engagement is relational, rooted in leadership development and community change, and built upon the mutual interests of schools and families.;Data for this project was collected over two years and is presented as a layered ethnography. With an emphasis on the multiple contexts and settings (e.g., community organization, school, parent cohorts) that shape parent engagement as well as the multiple factors that shape the dynamic research process and relationship between researcher and participants, the layered ethnography incorporates elements of ethnography and portraiture, combining research product with process and scientific rigor with aesthetics. By analyzing the acts of parent engagement as well as the process through which parents are introduced and integrated into schools, the study also explores the multiple dimensions of parent participation. |
