My group made a great academic poster on the subject for our first-year course. Many thanks to Blair Winters, Laura Phillips, and Jillian McSweeney-Nicodemus for their extraordinary contributions. If you wish to access to FULL SIZE (9.7 MB) version of the poster for reprinting, I have posted it at the Internet Archive for your use:
http://archive.org/details/ParentTeacherCommunication
If you just want to see a small JPG of it, feel free to check it out here. The abstract is below, and then you can decide if you need more.
ABSTRACT:
School communities can fail or thrive based on the relationship between educators and parents: all too often, this relationship breaks down due to a number of measurable factors. This project presents a survey of the articles and case studies that compile these factors and try to make sense of the complexities of school-parent contact. From our research, we identified two key questions: why is parent/teacher communication so disconnected? and how can we improve parent-teacher communication? It is important to note that disconnectedness is key to our discussion: teachers and parents want to communicate, but are distanced by virtue of many problems. The first section of our findings addresses why the disconnect happens in four key areas: race and culture, efficacy, socioeconomic status, and perceptions. The second section presents possible solutions to help the community connect, but instead addresses the players in parent-teacher communication: parents, teachers, students, and tech tools.
Our wicked awesome postah!
The podcast is my first enhanced podcast format project. I had fun with GarageBand, Creative Commons, and Pierre Bourdieu. I also discovered the joys of The Internet Archive, a site for public content where you can upload your media. Please check out my first attempt at enhanced podcasting at the Internet Archive:
“21st Century Parent Teacher Communications and Technology: A Marxist Paradigm (?)”
P.S.: I owe you a cookie if you can find out the title of the LAST song in the podcast. HINT: I chose something…thematic.
teachbygoofyaccent 