Making curriculum links with homes and communities

4 Suiting Links to Purposes

Curriculum links should be adopted in terms of their purpose.  These include:

• informing parents and the community about the school curriculum and children’s progress through it
• supporting community members, especially parents, in understanding the school curriculum so that they can help children learn from it
• making classroom learning relevant to and reflective of children’s out of school experiences, including children’s home literacy practices and multi modalities.

Student teachers on placements are unlikely to encounter the first two purposes, but should be made aware of them. Most should be able to initiate links for the third purpose.

These three purposes represent three different roles for the school and community  in three different kinds of situation:

• where the school rightfully needs to voice its authority as an expert on the school curriculum
• where it needs assistance from parents or the community in delivering this curriculum
• where using home and community curricula and literacy practices can assist the school’s own provision.

These different links can all be informed by other literacy practices and curricula but to different degrees.  Here, student teachers might find it useful to think of the curricular flow as moving in different directions:

• from the school to parents and employers and other members of the community (e.g. on parents’ evenings and in references)
  Schools are on their traditional territory here but need to ensure that parents and employers are sufficiently aware of the school’s curriculum and assessment terminology to understand the impact of what is being said, including providing translators.

• in a specially designed meeting place between the school and its community where both have an active role to play (e.g. when parents attend a Family Learning course to help them support their children at home)
  Here schools are giving up some of their traditional control over the curriculum and its teaching, acknowledging that they need  help and recognising parent’s competence in providing it.

• from home and community to the classroom for example where teaching and learning sequences include  features of home pedagogies (as in play, improvised drama, and child led discussion) or learning contexts and references are drawn from outside school
  Here schools are supporting continuity of learning from home and community to school and acknowledging that “the curriculum” is a melding of school and out- of - school learning.