The REA Annual Meeting 2023 theme is organized around the question, "Whose children are they?" as a way to explore diverse and intersecting ways that we take and/or assign responsibilities for children's religious education. In this essay, the Program Chair reflects on personal and scholarly experiences and questions that have framed and…

This article is a reflective piece. It asks questions to support discussions in staffrooms and team meetings about what a 'new normal' could look like in schools. The author advocates a better partnership between teachers, students and parents in which they adopt a more equitable relationship built on mutual respect and trust - a partnership where…

This teacher reflection includes tips on family communication during a crisis. The reflection includes notes from the field on the transition to digital learning due to COVID and how to increase family communication when students are not able to be physically present in school.

In a 2011 article in this journal, Hornby and Lafaele provided a comprehensive model to understand barriers that may adversely impact effectiveness of parental involvement (PI) in education. The proposed explanatory model provides researchers with a new comprehensive and systematic perspective of the phenomenon in question with references from an…

The seven papers in this issue address a variety of challenges that parents in several different cultural places encounter as they do their best to ensure their children's safe, happy, and successful development from infancy through middle childhood: infant sleep, developmental agendas, temperament, preschools, academic success, and learning to be…

In this review of the "Educational Goods," the author provides a set of comments that might extend the worthy framework provided by Brighouse, Ladd, Loeb and Swift. In particular, the author calls attention to the ways in which continued work within this project might broaden its conceptualisation of educational goods, increase the scope…

Largely led by parents of school-age children from around the country, the opt-out movement has gained momentum in resisting the overuse of standardized testing. The author, a teacher educator, former K-12 teacher, and parent, argues that the opt-out movement is raising awareness regarding standardized testing and opening the door toward policy…

This letter to the editor responds to an article by Nicola Brandaro and Biza Stenfert Kroese (2018) entitled "Can adults with Asperger's syndrome learn about positive attachment behaviors between parents and young babies through the use of a skill-training DVD." One of the authors of this letter is an autistic parent who has successfully…

This commentary paper offers a broader definition of the construct of the home learning environment and an updated conceptual framework. Recent empirical research has burgeoned on the home learning environment and is mainly examining how processes mediate the way parenting practices influence a child's development and learning. By introducing the…

Kappan editor Rafael Heller interviews Annette Lareau about her research into different experiences of childhood and family life. In her observations of families of different social classes, she learned that upper-middle-class families approach parenting as an act of "concerted cultivation" requiring ongoing attention, making them more…

This Reflection on Practice is based upon a change in the undergraduate course "Family and Community Relations." Historically, this course has been taught on campus in a lecture format, as well as small and large group activities. However, during a spring semester at a midsized Midwestern University, it was altered to provide more direct…

Homeschooling can be challenging. Particularly as children age, parents can find themselves out of their depth trying to teach more advanced coursework. Many families also want their children to be part of a community while still maintaining primary control of their child's education. For them, traditional schools (whether public or private,…

In this brief comment on "Educational Goods," I raise two worries about the authors' proposed normative framework for educational decision-makers. The first concerns the omission of rationality, or responsiveness to reasons, from the list of educational goods; the second concerns the inclusion of parental interests in the list of…

We gratefully reply to our five commentators, responding to their criticisms and comments under the following headings: parochialism and curriculum; rationality and truth; production and distribution; perfectionism, decision-making and disagreement; adultism and parents' interests; non-consequential educational goods; and self-education. [For…

In this article, I respond to my father's 2005 article "From Here to Clare: Yearnings of a Scholar-Turned-Dad." My goal is to share whether and how I followed the guidance he set forth, and how those recommendations shaped my life and moral development as an undergraduate student and beyond. It is my hope that students find inspiration…