Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers is intended to stimulate broad thinking about how to meet the challenges of education in a pluralistic society. It is a powerful resource for in-service and preservice multicultural education and professional development. The Guide presents a framework for understanding differences and conflicts that arise in situations where school culture is more individualistic than the value system of the home. It shares what researchers and teachers of the Bridging Cultures Project have learned from the experimentation of teacher-researchers in their own classrooms of largely immigrant Latino students and explores other research on promoting improved home-school relationships across cultures.

The framework leads to specific suggestions for supporting teachers to:
*understand differences between home cultures and school culture; *enhance cross-cultural communication; *organize parent-teacher conferences that work; *use strategies that increase parent involvement in schooling; *increase their skills as researchers; and *employ ethnographic techniques to learn about home cultures. Teachers have found that using the Bridging Cultures framework enables them to generate their own solutions to problems, develop methods for effective teaching, and work with parents as true partners. This framework helps make teaching easier because teachers are working with, not against, the cultural values and practices children bring from home. For this reason, it also helps teachers, schools, and parents prevent both covert cross-cultural conflicts and those that go unrecognized as a source of problems in learning and communication. This Guide is not a "how-to" handbook, although it does offer specific suggestions on how to improve home-school relationships with immigrant families. Rather, it presents a generative paradigm from which an infinite number of innovative practices can be created by teachers working within the framework. Although the research underlying the Bridging Cultures Project and this Guide focuses on immigrant Latino families, since this is the primary population with which the framework was originally used, it is a potent tool for learning about other cultures as well because many face similar discrepancies between their own more collectivistic approaches to childrearing and schooling and the more individualistic approach of the dominant culture.

Preface
Responding to the Increase in Classroom Diversity
Introducing a Framework for Understanding Culture
A Truly Useful Theoretical Framework
The Bridging Cultures Project
Organization of the Guide
A Few Words about Terminology
Acknowledgments

1. The Bridging Cultures Framework
But First, What Is Culture?
The Power of the Bridging Cultures Framework
Limitations of a Single Model for Child Development
The Dynamic Nature of Culture
Individualism and Collectivism
Further Contrasts between Individualism and Collectivism
Different Orientations, Different Outcomes
Individualism and Collectivism in Collision
Relationship to Other Frameworks for Understanding Cultures
Strands of Multicultural Education
Conclusion

2. Parent Involvement: Recommended but Not Always Successful
"Minority" Parent Involvement
Parent-School Partnerships: Responsibilities of Parents and Schools
Factors Influencing Parent Participation
Questioning Assumptions
Looking beyond Demographics to Interpersonal Processes
Finding Common Ground between Home and School

3. The Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conference
What Is a Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conference?
The Tradition of Parent-Teacher Conferences
Research on Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conferences
Culture and Communication in the Parent-Teacher Conference
Using Cultural Knowledge to Enhance Communication
Improving Parent-Teacher Conferences
Putting the Parent-Teacher Conference in Proper Perspective

4. Learning What Works
Understanding Parents' Points of View
Evaluating the Messages That Schools Send
Being More Conscious of the Messages Sent
Developing Closer Personal Relationships with Families
Extending Opportunities for Parent-Teacher Interaction
Promoting Bicultural Proficiency

5. Teachers as Researchers
Action Research
Inquiry and Reflection: Two Intertwined Elements in Action Research
Teachers as Researchers in the Bridging Cultures Project
Collaborative Action Research
Ethnographic Inquiry
Teacher Research as Professional Development
How Successful Has Collaborative Action Research Been in the Bridging Cultures Project?
A Hope and a Touch of Reality

6. Conclusion: The Challenge of Coming Together
The Need for Cultural Knowledge
Update: What's Happening Now?
How Does Bridging Cultures Fit into the Big Picture of School Reform?
What's to Be Gained?

Appendix The Bridging Cultures Project in Brief
Background and Purpose
The People
Phase I Procedures
Workshop Outcomes
Phase II Changes in Teachers' Roles
Documenting Teacher Change
Powerful Examples Make the Framework Come Alive
References
Author Index
Subject Index