1.4 Building a Positive Educational Community

Within the systems mentioned, the family-school partnership aims at promoting the participation of significant caregivers (e.g., parents, grandparents, stepparents, foster parents) in the educational process (Fishel & Ramirez, 2005). Participation can be characterized by the quality of the learning experience from the learner perspective, and therefore it must incorporate the views of the learners themselves (Ainscow, 2016).  In addition, school-level process factors contribute facilitating or hindering a sense of belonging and a sense of autonomy to the learner, as well as a sense of a meaningful participation with peers of the same age.

For a full participation of all to the educational process, the involvement of both the meso (family, school, or classroom) and micro (individual learner) levels should be then considered (Ramberg & Watkins, 2020). Evidence exists, in fact, that positive parenting roles and practices support children's efforts in school and lead to academic achievement and social skills improvement (Sheridan, Witte, Holmes, Wu, Bhatia, Angell, 2017a; Smith, Reinke, Herman & Huang, 2019). An effective school-family partnership has been shown to be responsible for supporting and improving children's learning opportunities and experiences: when the development of these interactions is regularly part of the education process, benefits for children, teachers and families are achieved through positive changes in social skills and adaptive children’s behaviors, through the use of effective strategies for teachers and through the positive and effective practices of parents to help their child succeed in school (Sheridan et al. 219).

Participation for all is also a core concept of inclusive education, that is the “struggle to ensure access to meaningful and equitable education”. Besides contextualizing inclusive education within local systems and variable in terms of socio-historical context and school organization (Slee & Allan, 2001; Waitoller & Kozleski, 2013), recent studies underline other key factors responsible for creating an inclusive environment. Attitudes and beliefs of teachers, for instance, play a key role (Oluremi, 2015). It is worth mentioning here, in particular, their self-efficacy and agency that is their ability to be effective in impacting and changing the contexts where they work (Ferrari & Sgaramella, 2020).