The journey from traditional parent involvement to an alliance for empowerment: A paradigm shift

University education partners have great potential to facilitate schools' moving from a school led traditional approach for family involvement to an asset based, empowerment approach to partnerships. On this journey, educators grapple with the cognitive dissonance of change as they engage their emerging multilingual families in the lives of their children at school and learn about their funds of knowledge. This journey can be understood as a continuum of development that starts with compliance with grant-focused family engagement requirements and ideally ends with an empowered family-school-community alliance that supports the learning community for all members. This continuum is illustrated with 3 school districts at different stages of development. While all made progress, good intentions did not always result in great success, and work remains to be done in self-reflection, shifting from deficit thinking to an asset approach, and developing shared participation and leadership. The article concludes with insights gained from education partners' translation of transformative ideas into concrete change, along with suggestions for improving the process taken from lessons learned on this journey.