Notable new books by 91̽�� faculty members include studies of military cultural education programs and equitable collaboration between schools and families. Also, National Endowment for the Humanities support for a coming book on an 18^th century India poet, and a National Jewish Book Award.

Volume of essays co-edited by Naomi Sokoloff wins 2019 National Jewish Book Award for anthologies, collections

A book co-edited by , 91̽��professor of Hebrew and comparative literature, has won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award for anthologies and collections from the .

“),” edited by Sokoloff with of Washington University, is a volume of scholars, writers and translators discussing the changing status of Hebrew in the United States. The book was published by 91̽�� Press in June 2018.

The book features a diverse group of distinguished contributors discussing the questions, publisher notes state: “Why Hebrew, here and now? What is its value for contemporary Americans? To what extent is that sta­tus affect­ed by evolv­ing Jew­ish iden­ti­ties and shift­ing atti­tudes toward Israel and Zion­ism? Will Hebrew pro­grams sur­vive the cur­rent cri­sis in the human­i­ties on uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus­es? How can the vibran­cy of Hebrew lit­er­a­ture be con­veyed to a��larg­er audience?”

The Jewish Book Council established the in 1950. Winners of the 2019 awards, across 18 categories, will be honored at a ceremony March 17 in New York.

To learn more, contact Sokoloff at naosok@uw.edu.

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Heidi Pauwels receives National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for book on ‘India’s 18^th century Mona Lisa’��

, professor in the Department of Asian Languages & Literature, has been awarded a $45,000 National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to work on her planned book, “The Voice of India’s 18th Century Mona Lisa: Songs by Rasik Bihari of Kishangarh.”

The book will explore the poetry and life of an 18^th-century woman known as , or Rasik Bihari, who was an elegant court performer and favorite of the Indian crown prince Sāvant Singh (1699-1764) of , a city in the Indian state of Rajasthan. She turns out to have been a composer in her own right under the pseudonym of Rasik Bihari.

Pauwels, who also coordinates the department’s South Asia Program, recently wrote a book about Singh. “” was published in 2017 by 91̽�� Press.

The fellowship was announced Jan. 14, part of a NEH of $30.9 million in grants supporting 188 humanities projects in 45 states. Read more on the Simpson Center for the Humanities .

To learn more, contact Pauwels at hpauwels@uw.edu.

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Ann Ishimaru pens book on equitable school-family collaboration

Teachers College Press has published “,” by , associate professor in the 91̽��College of Education. The book examines the challenges and possibilities of creating more equitable forms of collaboration among nondominant families, communities and schools.

“As we’ve been trying to make changes to the long-standing and persistent racial inequities that exist in our schools and really transform education, my argument is that we’ve overlooked a vital source of expertise and leadership — and that resides in the families and communities of students themselves,” Ishimaru said in an .

The book is drawn on Ishimaru’s work as principal investigator of the UW-based and the project over more than a decade. The book describes core concepts for equitable collaboration and provides multiple examples of effective practices.

Listen to a College of Education-produced with Ishimaru. To learn more, contact Ishimaru at aishi@uw.edu.

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Paula Holmes-Eber co-edits book on building military cultural competence

As recent international conflicts have shown, the military officer of today must be both warrior and diplomat, combatant and humanitarian worker, soldier and peacekeeper. An anthology coedited by , affiliate professor in the Jackson School of International studies, explores how today’s militaries can prepare their leaders for such complex roles.

“,” edited by Holmes and Kjetil Enstad of The Norwegian Defence University College, compares research on the successes and failures of military cultural education and training programs in seven countries: The United States, Canada, Argentina, Norway, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.

“Warriors or Peacekeepers” will be published in March by Springer. To learn more, contact Holmes-Eber at pholmese@uw.edu.

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Justin Jesty’s ‘Arts and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan’ honored

“,” a 2018 book by , associate professor of Japanese language and literature, has been awarded the by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, known as ASAP for short.

The book, a cultural history of post-World War II Japan, was published in September 2018 by Cornell University Press. The award was announced in late 2019.

To learn more, contact Jesty at jestyj@uw.edu or visit his .

91̽��Notebook is a section of the 91̽��News site dedicated to telling stories of the good work done by faculty and staff at the 91̽��. Read all posts here.

. And in a building that opened in 1960 as a junior-senior high school with 1,200 students, enrollment had dropped steadily to barely a third of its original size. By 2008, the predominantly African-American school had landed on the then-superintendent’s list of proposed closures.

What happened next, explained , a 91̽�� associate professor of education, could have mirrored the story of many struggling schools around the country: a staff housecleaning, a curricular overhaul, maybe even an administrative takeover, all aimed at improving student achievement at an “underperforming” school.

Instead, the parents, students and leadership of Rainier Beach upended the usual trajectory, Ishimaru said, embracing the school and making the effort to save it a community undertaking. Ishimaru studied the school’s transformation and published her findings in August in the Journal of Educational Administration.

“There was a very collaborative effort to reimagine what a community school could and should be,” Ishimaru said. “This wasn’t due to any one person.”

For the , Ishimaru pored through documents and data and interviewed students, parents and a variety of school and district staff and administrators. The goal, she explained, was to provide a comprehensive look at how a community collaborated and transformed a school with a focus on social justice.

Typically, there is a top-down approach to so-called “turnaround” improvement strategies ­— a federal classification associated with grant money, Ishimaru said. Policies are premised on the notion that dramatic disruption – such as closing a school or firing most of the staff – will improve achievement as measured by test scores.

But that approach ignores the racial inequities embedded in the educational system since the beginnings of formal education in the U.S., Ishimaru said. From segregation and property tax-based resource disparities among schools to implicit bias in the classroom, the fundamental structures and routines of public schools tend to disproportionately close opportunities for students of color, particularly in working class communities. . For the most part, the use of turnaround policies, Ishimaru said, has reinforced a narrative that blames students, families and communities for school “failure”—in short, exacerbating racial inequities.

“We have a set of broader narratives in the public about our schools, and about certain schools, in particular: schools as broken, failing communities, parents as disengaged,” she said. “They function to lead us to certain ideas about what needs to happen to ‘fix’ those schools and communities, and what they completely overlook is the capacity and expertise in those schools and communities to be able to do that.”

At Rainier Beach, news of the proposed closure in 2008 galvanized a core group of parents and neighbors. They organized to communicate the school’s strengths, repurposed the PTA and leveraged their role into that of a joint administration/community advisory committee. With the help of a new principal and an influx of resources, parents supported installing a rigorous curriculum, a program usually associated with more affluent schools. School and PTA leaders reached out to the community directly, holding meetings at familiar locations instead of flooding the area with robo-calls and letters mailed home. Over time, students took up the social justice cause with the support of local community organizations. WA-BLOC started the summer program and supported youth leaders in for free transit passes for high school students, facilitating restorative justice circles and training teachers on how to recognize and address bias.,

Today, nearly 750 students are enrolled at Rainier Beach, which for its improvement efforts in 2016. Nearly all y11^th-graders takes at least one IB class. And while not every data point is one that traditional reform advocates would tout, one statistic is hard to ignore: In 2017, graduated in four years — higher than the school district and state averages.

Ultimately, reimagining Rainier Beach was a years-long process, Ishimaru said, but one that offers lessons for other schools.

“Some of the core ideas could be replicated elsewhere, but the danger would be for a district administration to take this and approach it from the top down,” she said. “Part of the ‘secret sauce’ at Rainier Beach is that it wasn’t just a top-down fix. One of the things this case represents is that justice-based change requires a collective of people working at multiple levels simultaneously, particularly those directly affected by inequities. Powerful things can emerge when educators and local communities work collaboratively across roles.”

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For more information, contact Ishimaru at aishi@uw.edu.

Most schools offer parents specific ways to help out: Join the PTA, chaperone a field trip, grade papers for a teacher or assist on a classroom art project.

Those volunteer opportunities, however, not only reinforce the top-down power structure of schools, but also cater to mostly white, privileged families, maintaining the institutionalized racism that marginalizes low-income families and families of color, said , assistant professor of education at the 91̽��.

What schools and districts can do instead, Ishimaru argues in a new paper, is partner with families in meaningful ways that go beyond “traditional, circumscribed” roles. By giving families a greater hand in decision-making, for example, school communities can begin to dismantle race- and class-based power structures.

“Once we really understand the problem, how deep these inequities go, it can be paralyzing,” Ishimaru said. “But if we can get out of everyone thinking they have to see it in terms of their own self-interest, it opens up all kinds of possibilities.”

Ishimaru’s appears in a July special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education.

While students of color make up the U.S. public school population, teachers of color make up less than 20 percent, according to the Department of Education. Ishimaru’s piece presents those statistics as a backdrop to her research about the importance of including and recognizing the knowledge of all families in a school community.

Ishimaru’s paper features a study out of a local, suburban school district whose enrollment is nearly two-thirds students of color, and where more than half of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. There, over the course of the 2014-15 school year, Ishimaru and her research team met with district administrators, principals, teachers and parents at two elementary schools to develop a new parent-education curriculum. The existing curriculum, which aimed to show parents how to support student learning, was more of a guide to supporting the “school’s preset agenda,” Ishimaru wrote in the paper.

The researchers found that by approaching the new curriculum as equal partners, the parents and teachers worked together to create nine lessons, extending the typical “plug-in” opportunities that limit parent participation, such as parent-teacher conferences and open houses.

That “co-design” model also challenged the assumptions of teachers and school leaders, many of whom were used to thinking they have the sole expertise and are accustomed to longstanding frameworks for engaging parents, Ishimaru said. Schools typically treat parents as clients or beneficiaries, she wrote in the paper, not as decision-makers alongside principals and teachers.

“In the current educational system, leaders make the first move, and what that says to parents is, ‘You can have a say in some things, but not all,'” she said.

Schools often work with parents in prescriptive settings such as events, or one-on-one meetings to address a need or problem, she explained. In many schools — usually in affluent and less diverse communities — parents are well-organized and savvy about how to advocate for their children. Teachers and school leaders, meanwhile, can find it easy to dismiss as “uninterested” parents who don’t show up for events, and children who act out as receiving little support at home. In this way, the educational system reinforces the power structure that marginalizes parents, especially those who don’t follow privileged norms.

��But opening up communication to acknowledge how history and power shape expectations and relationships, and loosening the boundaries between parents and staff, Ishimaru said, can begin to build a more equitable, productive and proactive school community.

At the school level, administrators can start by re-examining their own practices and making more collaborative some of their decision-making processes for curriculum, discipline, or even hiring, she said.

In the classroom, teachers can develop proactive relationships with all parents at the beginning of the year. They can start by learning about the cultural values and practices of their students, the hopes and dreams that families have for their children, and how they engage their children in learning at home, rather than calling parents only when there’s a problem. They can turn to families for other kinds of expertise, too, Ishimaru said. She pointed to the example of a teacher who, when launching a unit on leadership, realized nearly all of the leaders highlighted in the curriculum were white, male historical figures. So the teacher opened it up to her students and their families to identify other kinds of leaders, including those in their own communities.

This “co-design” approach is just one way to bridge divides among parents and educators of different race, class and linguistic backgrounds, Ishimaru said.

“At the end of the day, educators cannot address the deep inequities that exist in schools alone,” she said. “When schools and districts can learn from and meaningfully engage the expertise of the students, families, and communities who have been marginalized by our systems, we can begin to work together toward building more responsive and just schools.”

Sola Takahashi of WestEd was co-author.

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For more information, contact Ishimaru at 206-543-9840 or aishi@uw.edu.

91̽�� researchers studied , a collaborative effort to dramatically improve student achievement in seven school districts in South Seattle and South King County. In their after a yearlong study of the initiative, they found that students were most successful when schools and communities found creative and culturally responsive ways of engaging parents.

“The Road Map Project was very clear that parent-community engagement was one of the key mechanisms for achieving its 2020 goal, to double the number of young people who are on track to college and career and to close the opportunity gap,” said , assistant professor in the and co-author of the report.

The 91̽��is also one of many community partners of the project.

The idea of The Road Map Project is to go beyond traditional involvement such as parent-teacher conferences and associations and school open houses to offer parents more relevant ways to help their children succeed.

“We know from decades of research that it makes a difference when parents are involved in their child’s education,” Ishimaru said. “It helps not only students’ test scores, but also their behavior in school, attendance, the coursework they take. They are involved in higher-level programs and they’re more likely to graduate. Our study suggests promising ways to create more meaningful opportunities for family participation, especially in a region of such dramatic cultural and linguistic diversity.”

Districts in the project are Auburn, Federal Way, Highline, Kent, Renton, Seattle (only South Seattle schools) and Tukwila. Of the 119,000 students in that region, 66 percent are students of color, 58 percent come from low-income families and 167 different primary languages are spoken. Ishimaru and colleagues studied two of those districts – Federal Way and Kent – plus a community effort called White Center Promise Initiative.

Each Road Map Project entity is engaging parents in different ways. Federal Way uses family liaisons to help parents cultivate good relationships with school staff, and parents are given a “menu” of choices about how to be involved, from using specific tutorials at home to observing school board meetings or participating in leadership training.

Kent uses parent facilitators in different languages to teach a nine-week evening , which helps parents learn how to best advocate for their child and create educational partnerships with teachers and staff.

is a long-term effort to eradicate poverty by involving families in the services and support they need through schools and community organizations, and to help students graduate and go on to living-wage careers.

The 91̽��report shows one of the most effective strategies across school districts is to listen to parents to find out their concerns, priorities and expertise, and to do it in their own language. For instance, Federal Way Schools hosts workshops that allow parents to speak in their native language while the director of the district’s Family and Community Partnerships Office hears real-time translation through a headset. Those workshops, part of the district’s Parent Leadership Institute, also allow parents to share concerns and ideas with each other.

“Sometimes parents can’t speak English and schools don’t even think to plan for that,” Ishimaru said. “But more broadly, the problem is whether parents feel like they belong or are welcome. When schools only have traditional activities, like joining the PTA or giving money to a fundraiser, that’s telling parents there’s only one way to interact with the school.”

Ishimaru said it’s important for schools to be culturally responsive and use “cultural brokers.” Those are parents or others in the community who are usually bicultural and bilingual, and can guide immigrant and other non-English-speaking parents through the world of American public schools. They also can help educators better understand multi-cultural families and communities.

“These cultural brokers exist in every school and every community,” Ishimaru said. “At one school we found it was the woman who worked in the cafeteria. There was no family liaison at the school but everyone knew to just walk into the lunchroom and she would tell them what was going on.”

Ishimaru said the three sites they studied continue to refine their approaches to parent engagement. The Kent School District is now moving beyond the copyrighted California parent-engagement curriculum it bought to engage parents in developing its own curriculum, which adds components to help students develop a positive racial identity and better deal with bullying. Kent would then be able to share its curriculum with the rest of The Road Map region.

The report was co-authored by and a team of doctoral students in the 91̽��College of Education.

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For more information, contact Ishimaru at 206-543-9840 or aishi@uw.edu, or Lott at 206-685-9204 or jlott1@uw.edu.