13 - Building Home–School Connections within a Multicultural Education Framework: Challenges and Opportunities before and after President Trump’s Election

Summary

This chapter focuses on what took place in schools and in many classrooms in NYC after the US presidential election of 2016. The experiences shared reveal how teachers came together to comfort their students and one another amid anti-immigration fears. The lens of this study is unique, in that it is framed within a college course to build multicultural competence for pre-service teachers (college education students training to become teachers). The chapter provides a review of the theoretical underpinnings in building a course on multiculturalism and multilingualism for educators. The author then traces the changing perceptions about immigrant parents among the pre-service teachers. This includes how the teachers in training witnessed genuine and creative partnerships between their cooperating teachers and their students’ families prior to the 2016 election, and the fear and despair that children and their parents faced in the aftermath of the election. The pre-service teachers witnessed how their cooperating teachers implemented “damage control” strategies to comfort the children, each other, and to reach out to the families, highlighting the resilience and courage that filled the classrooms.