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This study uses authentic cariño to explore a care and connect model in a case study of a single district in Teachers Educating All Multilingual Students (TEAMS), funded by a National Professional Development (NPD) grant. Along with ESOL/dual language licensure coursework, teachers in five districts engage in family–school–community partnerships to develop multilingual family engagement. COVID‐19 required urgent shifts in how teachers and districts reached families and offered services. Accordingly, the research question is as follows: How did TEAMS teachers' conceptions of caring and connecting to support multilingual family engagement shift in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic? Data included three teacher focus groups per district, interviews with facilitators and administrators, and individual teacher interviews. Case study was used across districts, but focusing particularly on one district with high percentages of teachers of color and low‐income multilingual families, the population hardest hit and dehumanized during COVID‐19. Analysis employed critical authentic cariño to explore teachers' authentic and aesthetic care that shifted over time—from focus on technologies and translators, pity, depersonalized objectives, and academic goals to warmer relationships, personalismo, relaxing together, reaching out, persistence, and advocacy. Results suggest ways to transform structures to better meet the needs of multilingual families by organizing around authentic care with families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many teachers collaborated with and spoke up for multilingual families during the pandemic. Yet, little is known about how and why teachers' understanding of multilingual family engagement changed during remote teaching. This study gives six teachers from a school district with a small proportion of multilingual students a voice to tell their stories. Figured worlds theory and discourse analysis were used to interpret in-depth data to uncover how the figured world of multilingual family engagement developed for this group of teachers during COVID-19. Findings showed that even if these teachers dealt with the same challenges of remote teaching as other educators, they quickly began to realize how important partnerships with the families are. This new understanding resulted in a realignment of their actions. Moreover, these teachers became agents of change as they started to address inequities on behalf of their students which were increasingly made visible by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a project to support teachers and district administrators working with multilingual learners as they deepened relationships and understandings with multilingual families in five Oregon school districts. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which radically shifted the ways educators engaged with students' families, we repurposed this ongoing research to answer the question: How did teachers' and supporting administrators' conceptions of and actions to promote multilingual family engagement shift in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? Further influenced by the concurrent national protests for racial justice, we consider how teachers and administrators engaged in liberatory work as they questioned structures that had previously seemed inevitable or unproblematic. Framed using Harro's cycle of liberation, we discuss lessons learned based on systematic data collected from both teachers and administrators from multiple districts and multiple time points before and during pandemic-impacted schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe lessons learned from research on how teachers and districts can better support the education of multilingual learners—including insights gained from remote learning in response to COVID-19—through deepening relationships and understandings with multilingual families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]