Learning together: creating a community of practice to support English language learner literacy

This qualitative case study examines an after-school, bilingual family literacy programme that brought together several groups to form a community of practice (CoP) that worked to support the literacy development of English language learners and their families. We explored the following question: How do parents, teachers, students, and other school personnel interact within an after-school family literacy programme and learn from each other as a CoP? Our findings show that family literacy nights offered opportunities for collaboration between different CoPs that did not exist during the regular school day. They suggest that participating in family literacy nights can be an important way to connect various school-based groups to one another and to linguistically diverse families, creating a CoP united by participants' shared interest in literacy development.