Dr. Jen Stacy, Individual, Family, and Community Education

Name:

Dr. Jen Stacy

Title:

Assistant Professor

Department:

Individual, Family, & Community Education

Describe your research in about 200 words.

My research examines relationships between multilingual families and schools through a critical ethnographic lens. By looking at the cultural practices of family outreach, my work captures schools’ perceptions of families and how those perceptions influence formal and informal outreach initiatives through daily, commonplace activities. Examining conventional practices regarding how schools work with families provides opportunity to consider the degree to which these efforts are upholding equity (or not). My research also addresses how pre-service and in-service teachers learn about family-school relations through various stages of teacher education, advocating for culturally sustaining approaches that understand families through an asset-based lens and embrace their community cultural wealth. Understanding how schools and families relate to each other while articulating and critiquing the ideologies that sustain those relationships can guide structural and practical change.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

My students have taught me so much about the power of trusting a flexible, generative pedagogy that follows their interests. For example, one semester during a literacy methods class my students’ background knowledge and interests led us to a co-construct a unit about the literacies of the punk scene in East Los Angeles. The students, in turn, developed a strong grasp of community-based literacies and drew upon these to create culturally sustaining literacy learning experiences for young children.