ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses in family partnerships within the context of instructional work in three classrooms. It examines some of the critical literature that explores the various facets of parental engagement in children's education. It then profiles the collaborative work of teachers, parents, and children in New York City public schools' classrooms with large populations of emergent bilinguals. The first profile captures an activity in the context of a social studies inquiry unit in a Spanish Dual Language Bilingual kindergarten class; the second one focuses on a fourth grade class in which families and children collaborate in analyzing bilingual poetry; in the third class an English as a New Language (ENL) teacher in a high school in the Bronx engages parents in assessment using a Family Assessment Tool. The three teachers in these classrooms worked from a Juntos stance, partnering with families by designing spaces in which families' languages practices were at the forefront of a joint collaboration. They recognized the families as valuable sources of knowledge that can work hand in hand to cocreate knowledge and challenge traditional linguistic hierarchies.
