| One of the most sustained applications of the Question Formulation Technique beyond the classroom has been in the domain of parent engagement in education — the site, indeed, where the founding insight of the Right Question Institute was first articulated. Rothstein and Santana's second major book, //Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions// (ASCD), developed a systematic framework for using the QFT to equip parents — particularly parents who, like those in Lawrence, feel excluded from meaningful participation in their children's schooling by unfamiliarity with institutional procedures and uncertainty about what to ask — with the skill and confidence to engage effectively with teachers, administrators, and school systems. The work on parent engagement reflects a consistent theoretical commitment: that the barriers to educational equity are not only economic and structural but cognitive and democratic, that people are excluded from the institutions that affect them not only by poverty and discrimination but by the absence of a skill — the skill of asking one's own questions — that education itself should be providing, and that a tool as simple and accessible as the QFT can begin to address this exclusion at the level of the individual encounter, the individual parent, the individual child learning to direct her own inquiry. | One of the most sustained applications of the Question Formulation Technique beyond the classroom has been in the domain of parent engagement in education — the site, indeed, where the founding insight of the Right Question Institute was first articulated. Rothstein and Santana's second major book, //Partnering with Parents to Ask the Right Questions// (ASCD), developed a systematic framework for using the QFT to equip parents — particularly parents who, like those in Lawrence, feel excluded from meaningful participation in their children's schooling by unfamiliarity with institutional procedures and uncertainty about what to ask — with the skill and confidence to engage effectively with teachers, administrators, and school systems. The work on parent engagement reflects a consistent theoretical commitment: that the barriers to educational equity are not only economic and structural but cognitive and democratic, that people are excluded from the institutions that affect them not only by poverty and discrimination but by the absence of a skill — the skill of asking one's own questions — that education itself should be providing, and that a tool as simple and accessible as the QFT can begin to address this exclusion at the level of the individual encounter, the individual parent, the individual child learning to direct her own inquiry. |
