Ensuring eXperiences for Children's Early Learning Success (ExCELS) Lab

Welcome to ExCELS Lab!

Our work is about fostering better understandings of the early social and learning successes of young children growing up in urban poverty, as well as understanding how to better support the adult contributors to children’s early development: their parents and teachers. Underpinning the research with these adults are attempts to “flip the script,” so to speak, centering the voices of practitioners and family members supporting children’s development to highlight what they know, what they do, and how they do it, so that their expertise can inform a strengths-based knowledge base and better program/policy decisions. We seek to accomplish these goals, with our community partners, through the development of ecologically valid and culture-specific measurement of core constructs and through co-constructed intervention efforts. In our most recent intervention research (see the RISE Project), we seek to support stronger connections between home and school. Learn more >

Ethnocultural Diversity and the Home-to-School Link

Editors: Christine M. McWayne
Fabienne Doucet
Susan M. Sheridan

This book explores family-school partnerships and how they can be most effectively leveraged to ensure academic success for students from socioculturally diverse backgrounds. Chapters reimagine family-school partnerships within a context of shared power and authority, examine a spectrum of interventions that support culture-based modes of learning, and emphasize the potential for transformative learning to occur when students’ out-of-school lives are understood and meaningfully leveraged in school. Chapters also discuss how to foster bridges between parents and teachers, provide teachers with access to the rich cognitive and cultural resources of families, and enable all parties to begin viewing families as truly equal partners in children’s education. The book concludes with a commentary chapter that identifies necessary areas for further research.
Part of the Research on Family-School Partnerships book series (RFSP)