Home School & Community Relations by Carol Gestwicki

Home School & Community Relations by Carol Gestwicki

Chapter 14 of the book Home, School & Community Relations discusses how the community affects early childhood programs and schools and the learners’ parents and the techniques used by teachers and families as advocates for family and child issues within the community. The chapter covers the different actions the community takes that may impact schools and families, such as corporate involvement, legislative initiatives, connections within the community, and the role of the advocate and community as an educational resource. The legislative initiatives discussed in the chapter include the Family Medical Leave Act, temporary assistance for needy families, and the No Child Left Behind Act. The discussion about corporate involvement includes examples of how the business community has been involved in the education environment in the past. In the discussion about the community as an educational resource, the author focuses on nature, people, and material resources. Further, the discussion on the role of teachers as advocates includes the measures teachers should take to be effective advocates. The main measures discussed in this section include being informed and visible, sharing a story, adjusting and replicating, being a member of professional organizations, creating a connection with power structures in the community, contacting representatives, and voting. The chapter also reviews the interrelated social systems in the education environment based on the ideas of the ecological systems theory proposed by Urie Bronfenbrenner. I learned the following 10 ideas after reading the chapter;

Families and teachers have the power to change the community’s attention to support that can mutually benefit them and the children under their care (Gestwicki 443).

Examining the ills in society offers a new awareness of the problems that emerge when there are ineffective parenting roles and a weak family unit (Gestwicki 445).

The main problems faced by the community in its involvement in education include high unemployment and poverty rates, high school dropout rates, violence in school and at home, high drug addiction and crime rates, stress and family breakdowns, and different parent working patterns (Gestwicki 445).

The interrelated social systems in the education environment include the microsystem, mesosystem, ecosystem, and macrosystem (Gestwicki 445).

The microsystem includes the interactions and relationships a child has with their immediate environment, and the mesosystem offers the connections between the structures in the child’s microsystem (Gestwicki 445).

The ecosystem includes the structures that affect a child’s development through interaction with the structure within the microsystem, and the macrosystem includes the customs, cultural values, and laws that impact the structures that define family interactions(Gestwicki 446)

The Child Care and Development Block Grants offer money to states to train child care providers, offer child care assistance to moderate and low-income families, expand child care supply, develop referral programs and local resources to help connect families to child care providers and hire family child care providers (Gestwicki 450)

The No Child Left Behind Act was developed to improve public education by encouraging the use of verified educational methods, gaining strong accountability from school systems and the schools for academic results, offering more options for parents, and encouraging the use of verified educational techniques (Gestwicki 452)

The main attributes of highly effective collaborative programs in the education environment include flexibility, comprehensiveness, perseverance, and responsiveness, seeing children in their family contexts, operating in settings that encourage educators to build strong relationships based on respect and mutual trust, dealing with families as parts of communities and neighborhoods, trained staff supported to offer responsive, high-quality services, good management by committed and competent individuals with clearly identifiable skills and preventive, and long-term orientation with a clear mission and continued evolution over time (Gestwicki 454)

Connecting with power structures in the community requires determining the main stakeholders who can help the advocate know who can impact programs and policy, identifying leaders who are acquainted with or know early childhood issues, and creating a relationship with people who are important to community decisions (Gestwicki 463).

Works Cited

Gestwicki, Carol. “It Takes a Village: Teachers, Families, and Communities.” Home, School & Community Relations, Cengage Learning, Boston, MA, 2016, pp. 443–463.

ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

We’ll write everything from scratch

---

After reading the chapter, you will need to write a paragraph (8-10 sentences) for the chapter generally describing what the chapter covered, and then list 10 ideas/concepts that you learned while reading.

Please number the list of 10 items you learned so that it is easy to see that you have met the requirements, and be sure to write in complete sentences; simply typing terms from the chapter is not adequate.
The book is Home, School & Community Relations by Carol Gestwicki.