Examining narratives: Conversations between community mentors and pre-service teachers

State policy and teacher evaluation rubrics increasingly call for attention to family and community engagement. Yet teachers, schools, and families continue to face a number of obstacles preventing collaboration on all sides. Research on culturally responsive teaching, funds of knowledge, and community teaching have identified a number of concrete principles and practices for educators to partner with families and communities. However, teacher education programs continue to struggle in crafting authentic experiences for pre-service teachers to partner with families and communities. This study examines regionallybased, small group discussions– which, were part of a larger programmatic set of experiences–between preservice teachers and partnering community mentors in one teacher education program. Using narrative analysis, the authors found that conversations revealed layered engagement mediated by levels of trust and pre-existing expectations.