Abstract:
Reading success continues to be concern for many governments, educators and parents. Despite many advances in the teaching of reading, international statistics show that there are still significant numbers of children failing to master this essential skill. One model of raising reading achievement which is prevalent in the literature is to engage parental support for learners. Many such programmes rely on training parents to follow a specific approach which can unintentionally marginalise parent's own knowledge, values and aspirations for their child or children. This presentation reports on a collaborative action research intervention where parents were supported to develop strategies to coach their children in reading. Individualised strategies were co-constructed in response to reading assessment data, parent priorities, feedback, and research informed strategies for teaching reading. Grounded analysis and synthesis of the strategies used by parents and the methods of enactment led to the development of a new term; home based pedagogy. The concept of home-based pedagogies offers a way of respecting the knowledge and skills of both parents and educators to improve learning outcomes for children. This approach may be of interest to anyone working with parents in an educational context and more specifically to those working in the field of literacy learning.