Hidden Boundaries Shape Family-School Partnerships in Multicultural Classrooms

Hidden Boundaries: Immigrant Parents’ Invisible Engagement Challenges What Schools Count as Partnership

When a preschool teacher counts the parents who answer her messages, she believes she is measuring engagement. A new case study suggests that measurement may be quietly failing the very families she most wants to reach. The research, published open access on 29 August 2026 in the Early Childhood Education Journal, documents how cultural background shapes what teachers and parents each understand family-school partnership to mean—and how some of the most devoted forms of parental support can remain entirely invisible to the institutions that claim to value them. Conducted by doctoral researcher Zhiyue Lu and professor Stephanie C. Sanders-Smith of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the study examined a single multicultural early childhood classroom serving a predominantly immigrant population and found significant misalignments between the conceptualizations of the two teachers and two parents interviewed. While the American-born head teacher emphasized visible, school-based participation, the immigrant parents and a Congolese teaching assistant described engagement built on trust, home-based support, and community networks that conventional frameworks simply do not register.

The setting was Maple Grove Early Learning Center, a pseudonymous public early childhood program in a mid-size Illinois city whose county hosts immigrant populations from more than 76 countries, including China, Mexico, India, Guatemala, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The demographics of the school underscore why the question matters: 48.8 percent of its children are classified as English language learners, 65.5 percent as low income, and 41.5 percent have Individualized Education Programs. The largest immigrant group at the school is families from the Democratic Republic of Congo who speak French, Lingala, or both at home. In response, the program actively recruits assistant teachers from the DRC who can communicate with children and families and serve as cultural brokers—a staffing decision that turned out to be central to the study’s findings. Following Stake’s definition of an intrinsic case study, a bounded system investigated for its own sake rather than for broad generalization, the researchers focused on one classroom of 28 children taught in morning and afternoon sessions.

Methodologically, the study relied on semi-structured, open-ended interviews of roughly 45 minutes with each participant, conducted between December 2024 and January 2025—the head teacher in person and the others via Zoom, with automated transcription later cleaned for analysis. The team operationally defined family engagement along four dimensions: families’ beliefs and values about their role in supporting children’s learning; the practices through which families support children at home and in the community; communication and relationship-building between families and educators; and shared or divergent expectations about decision-making. Lu then applied reflexive thematic analysis, the approach developed by Braun and Clarke, in three iterative phases: open coding with paired comparisons within role-based dyads, cross-case comparison anchored to the four dimensions, and refinement through re-reading passages that complicated emerging interpretations. Reflexive notes documented analytic decisions, and trustworthiness was addressed through Lincoln and Guba’s criteria of credibility, dependability, and confirmability, with traceable links between final themes and transcript excerpts. The second author independently read all four transcripts and met regularly with the first author to challenge developing interpretations.

The interpretive backbone of the study is Funds of Knowledge theory, first developed by Luis Moll and colleagues in 1992 through ethnographic work with Mexican-origin households in Arizona. The framework defines funds of knowledge as “the historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being”—resources transmitted across generations through everyday practices, family networks, and community life, spanning caregiving, labor, faith, healing, and language. The theory rests on three assumptions with direct consequences for schools. First, all families possess such knowledge; disparities in school outcomes reflect institutional failures of recognition rather than absences of family knowledge. Second, these resources often reside in domains invisible to schools—home routines, community-based learning, intergenerational transmission of values—so surfacing them requires deliberate inquiry by educators. Third, recognition is an epistemic commitment: families must be treated as legitimate sources of knowledge about their own children’s learning and as legitimate partners in educational decision-making. This stands in contrast to institution-centered typologies, such as Epstein’s six types of involvement—parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making, and collaborating with the community—and to the school-directed logic of “involvement” that scholars distinguish from reciprocal, two-way “engagement.”

The four participants illustrate why those distinctions are consequential. Elise, the White, US-born head teacher and a monolingual English speaker, grew up with college-educated parents deeply involved in her schooling, and she defines engagement through hands-on participation, proactive communication, and alignment with school expectations. Mariel, a Black teaching assistant who immigrated from the DRC as an adult, grew up in a country where schooling is not universally accessible and families pay out of pocket; for her, “My parents supported me in school, but they didn’t have any specific relationship with the school. Just paying and sending me.” Colette, a parent who also immigrated from the DRC, had a father who was “all the time behind my school,” and she arrived eager to be involved—but her interactions ran mostly through Mariel, who shares her home language and cultural background. Selma, a White parent who immigrated from Algeria and worked at the school as a teaching assistant and later a head teacher, recalled her own mother’s less visible involvement, such as baking for school events or helping in the school garden.

The misalignments surface most sharply in communication. Elise reported that “at least 90 to 95 percent” of her families respond to messages, and she hoped for “just really any communication, any response,” recalling years when she never heard from some parents at all. She offered resources such as weekend food bags universally—”I never want to judge… I offer it to everybody. I don’t want to single anyone out.” Yet the researchers observed a telling contradiction: even as Elise articulated a desire to recognize varied kinds of home support, she remained frustrated when families did not adhere to her personal definition of home-school relationships, indicating that her broadened definition stayed rhetorical rather than practical. The parents, meanwhile, described the teacher’s communication as one-directional information delivery, mostly behavior updates—”she’s chill; she’s happy”—and were largely satisfied with that. Colette noted the structural realities that make school-based participation hard: “We are tired, very exhausted… it’s sometimes hard to check the kid’s backpack.” Both parents voiced a transactional view of the relationship: “This is their job, to meet the needs of the parents and the kids.”

Perhaps the study’s most striking material concerns Mariel, whose role as a cultural and linguistic insider enabled communication the rest of the school could not achieve. Beyond sharing her phone number with Congolese families—who made up roughly 60 percent of the class—she built a WhatsApp group for announcements and ran an informal relay through community structures: “I can call the president of our community or give the message to the one who has a Facebook page that he can write stuff.” Snow-day notices and school announcements often traveled this way. For Colette, hearing Congolese French and Lingala inside her child’s school was “feeling like home,” and having a staff member who understood Congolese cultural practices allowed concerns to be raised informally and without friction. But the researchers found a limit: because Mariel mediated so effectively, direct relationship-building between Elise and the families atrophied. Without sufficient resources and institutional support, the authors report, these interactions tended toward information exchanges rather than the reciprocal engagement associated with transformative partnerships—cultural brokering functioning as a patch, not a solution.

The study also documents the cost of improvised cross-cultural communication. Elise described a conference held without a translator: “I did not speak French. We did not have a translator. It was so uncomfortable and awkward,” and she wished for more interpretation support. Selma observed that families’ cultural backgrounds rarely entered school life beyond enrollment paperwork: “It was just like a routine. It’s the same questions we ask every parent.” Read through a Funds of Knowledge lens, the authors argue, such procedural neutrality is a missed opportunity to affirm and integrate household-based knowledge into the classroom. The study situates this within a broader literature on deficit thinking—the tendency of schools to portray families who do not follow White, middle-class engagement norms as lacking the resources or knowledge to support their children’s education, which reinforces hierarchical power structures rather than collaboration. Notably, the teachers’ understanding of families’ funds of knowledge was shaped by informal experience rather than structured professional development, and without intentional and ongoing preparation, cultural responsiveness remained “situational and surface-level.”

The authors are careful about scope: this is a small-scale, exploratory case with four participants drawn from a single classroom, based on voluntary participation, and one parent participant was herself working as a teacher at the school—so self-selection may have underrepresented the least engaged or most marginalized voices. But the implications reach beyond one site. As classrooms across the United States diversify, the study argues that engagement cannot be captured by standardized expectations of visibility within school space; meaningful engagement also takes the form of home-based practices, trust-based relationships, and informal communication within community networks, all of which remain invisible when schools rely solely on visibility-centered metrics. The researchers call for systemic approaches to cultural competence in teacher preparation and institution-wide practices that honor diverse forms of family engagement, rather than reliance on individual cultural insiders. One-size-fits-all solutions, they conclude, rarely address the realities of linguistically diverse families; the goal is a move from narrow, school-centered models of involvement toward reciprocal, culturally responsive partnerships in which no family’s devotion goes unseen.