Preparing the Educators Who Teach About Families: Engaging Family Science in the University Setting

• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Katherine R. Allen,Erin S. Lavender‐Stott
• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12421

K R. AVirginia Tech

E S. L-SSouth Dakota State University

Preparing the Educators Who Teach About Families:

Engaging Family Science in the University Setting

In this article, we address foundational and

innovative aspects of preparing educators who

teach about families, including theoretical,

methodological, and practical considerations.

We approach our task by dening and utilizing a

human development and family science (HDFS)

worldview, which, like the related foci on trans-

lational family science and family life education,

integrates both the need for comprehensive aca-

demic grounding and professional preparation

in the service of improving individual and family

lives. We integrate the HDFS worldview with

critical pedagogy and feminist praxis in family

science that explicitly calls attention to inequal-

ity,oppression, and the need to empower individ-

uals, families, communities, and societies. One

of the hallmarks of HDFS scholarship and ped-

agogy on families is the intentional approach of

teaching students to work in elds where theyare

seeking to name and redress individual and fam-

ily vulnerability. In addition, we provide a com-

prehensive case study of collegiateeducation for

training graduate students who are preparing

to teach undergraduate students in the inter-

disciplinary eld of HDFS. Finally, we provide

directions for future research and implications

for practice in HDFS pedagogy and teacher

training in academic and community settings.

Department of Human Development and Family Science,

Virginia Tech,366 Wallace Hall (0416), 295 West Campus

Drive, Blacksburg, VA 24061 (kallen@vt.edu).

Key Words: critical pedagogy, family life education, family

science, feminist family studies, teaching.

Family science pedagogy involves a variety of

academic contexts that offer both a core struc-

ture to guide best professional practices in fam-

ily life education (Darling, Cassidy, & Rehm,

2017) and an invitation to interdisciplinarity that

allows family scholars and instructors to take

advantage of critical pedagogy beyond the tradi-

tional boundaries of family life education (Allen,

Floyd-Thomas, & Gilman, 2001). In this article,

we incorporate but also extend the purview of

family life education to engage with the wider

conversation about evidence-based pedagogical

practice in university settings.

We rst address the challenges and founda-

tional aspects of preparing educators who teach

about families, including theoretical, method-

ological, and practical considerations that are at

the core of an HDFS worldview, which refers to

our home discipline of human development and

family science (HDFS). We approach our task

by dening and utilizing this HDFS worldview,

which integrates both the need for compre-

hensive academic grounding with professional

preparation in the service of improving individ-

ual and family lives. The HDFS worldview is

reected in the recent analysis of translational

family science, culminating in the October 2017

issue of Family Relations. We highlight the

HDFS worldview because it is steeped in and

consonant with the critical pedagogy and praxis

(e.g., theory into action) aim of feminist family

studies that addresses inequality, oppression,

and the need for empowerment in individual

and family lives (e.g., Allen, Lloyd, & Few,

442Family Relations 69 (July 2020): 442–460

DOI:10.1111/fare.12421

Preparing Family Science Educators443

2009; Walker, 2009). We explicitly identify our

approach as feminist because it calls attention to

the intentional commitment of teaching students

to work in elds where they are seeking to under-

stand and improve the lives of vulnerable indi-

viduals and families from the perspective of the

families themselves, rather than from a top-down

perspective that is rooted in an approach that

values and privileges the status quo.

We also provide a comprehensive case study

of collegiate education for training graduate

students who are preparing to teach under-

graduate students in the interdisciplinary eld

of HDFS. This example is derived from the

experiences of an HDFS professor and a former

graduate student who is now a faculty member

herself. We specically address undergraduate

and graduate teaching in an academic setting,

while also acknowledging that there is a rich

variety of additional pedagogical contexts

within and beyond the university classroom

(e.g., extension, social service agencies, com-

munities, religious institutions)—that we are

not able to address in this one article—in which

scholars and practitioners provide outreach in

their teaching about families (e.g., Ballard &

Taylor, 2012; Darling etal., 2017; Duncan &

Goddard, 2017; Myers-Walls, Ballard, Dar-

ling, & Myers-Bowman, 2011). Notably then,

specic to the context of this special issue on

family life education, we focus on teaching

emerging professionals who will become fam-

ily life educators and teach future family life

educators—that is, teaching the teachers—not

on family life educators teaching lay audiences

in community settings. Finally, we provide

directions for future research and practice in

family science pedagogy and educator training.

I  I

C  T A F

The interdisciplinary study of families, typically

associated with Departments of HDFS (among

many other names, including family studies,

family science, and family and consumer sci-

ence; see Hans, 2014) is aligned not only with

the pedagogical practice of family life edu-

cation (e.g., Bailey & Gentry, 2013; Darling

et al., 2017; Hennon, Radina, & Wilson, 2013;

Myers-Walls etal., 2011) but also with inter-

disciplinary sources of knowledge and applica-

tion from which teachers and students may gain

new ideas and strategies to convey the critical,

complex, and always compelling subject mat-

ter about families (e.g., Allen, 2000; Few-Demo,

Humble, Curran, & Lloyd, 2016; Gentry, 2017;

Goldberg & Allen, 2018; Grzywacz & Allen,

2017; Hamon & Smith, 2014; Hoff & Dis-

telberg, 2017; Sprey, 2013). What guides our

eld, whether called HDFS, family science, or a

related term (Hans, 2014), is “a clear and cogent

commitment to making a positive difference in

human lives” (Grzywacz & Middlemiss, 2017,

p. 547).

Teaching about families, then, incorporates

the disciplinary-specic focus of family life

education historically afliated with HDFS

programs in what were once schools of home

economics or human ecology(e.g., Allen et al.,

2009; Darling, Cassidy,& Rehm, 2020; Ganong,

Coleman, & Demo, 1995), but family science

pedagogy is also much broader than the philos-

ophy and practice of family life education as a

professional domain (Allen & Henderson, 2018;

Gavazzi, Wilson, Ganong, & Zvonkovic, 2014;

Trask, Marotz-Baden, Settles, Gentry, & Berke,

2009). As Kerckhoff (1964) explained more

than half a century ago in one of the earliest

conceptualizations of family life education, the

effort to study and improve family life in an

increasingly complex society was born out of

concern with “social–cultural upheavals of the

nineteenthandtwentieth centuries .... [includ-

ing] radical changes in the roles of women,

in occupational and economic behavior, and

in the whole industrialization–urbanization

movement” (p. 881).

Family life education, broadly speaking, has

always valued both academic and social change

endeavors to help instructors teach about ways to

maximize individual, relational, and community

well-being. With its interdisciplinary roots in

scholarship that attempts to study and resolve the

challenges families face, family science in par-

ticular, and HDFS programs more broadly, have

always sought to translate science into practice

and to build on the strengths of conceptualizing

individuals in their familial, community, and

temporal–historical contexts (Allen et al., 2009;

Hamon & Smith, 2017; Perry-Jenkins, Herman,

Halpern, & Newkirk, 2017; Sabatelli, 2017;

Walker, 2009). Thus, HDFS college and univer-

sity programs have an inherent strength by being

both preprofessional conduits for translational

family science while also teaching critical think-

ing and interdisciplinarity that is the hallmark

of a liberal arts education. Indeed, the university