Networked professional learning communities for multilingual family engagement

Abstract It is important to prepare educators to work with students and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds beyond the offering of isolated professional development workshops. Networked professional learning communities (PLCs) offer a professional learning model to engage in service teachers to work together across schools and communities. In this study, we describe a year-long networked PLC project that includes 26 U.S. educators across 11 school districts in one state focusing on promoting literacy development for multilingual learners through family engagement. Using cultural-historical activity theory as a framework, we explore educators’ expansive learning, focusing on who is learning, why they learn, what they learn, and how they learn. The findings illustrate how networked PLCs offer learning opportunities for educators with various expertise and working in different education contexts to focus on dialogues and applications to engage multilingual families. Situating the findings within the literature regarding educator professional learning, we offer implications for both teacher educators and educational leaders to consider.