Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations

Finalist for the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Medal, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and/or Persons of Color) category!

In Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care, Nawal Qarooni invites us to step beyond school-centric, one-off events and practices to create more authentic, engaging collaborations with caregivers. Instead of asking what families can do to support schools, Qarooni asks how schools can identify and celebrate what families already inherently bring to their children’s literacy learning.

Establishing this work in holistic teaching—a pedagogical mindset that affirms the importance of loving the whole child through compassionate, collective care—Qarooni explores five critical literacy tenets by highlighting opportunities to listen for, honor, connect to, and elevate family strengths while inviting them even further into our shared work and encouraging reflection around:

• Recognizing the journey of process,
• Celebrating the role collaboration plays within the collective
• Using observational literacy to read the world
• Advocating for the power of talk to grow ideas and connect with others
• Giving children choice to make self-directed decisions

With moments of memoir woven in alongside diverse family examples and classroom stories connected to realistic instructional practices, Qarooni shows how all families contribute meaningfully to their children’s literacy lives. Discover how we can tap into those vast wells to support learning at home and in school while building positive, reciprocal relationships across both settings.

With an afterword by En Comunidad authors, Carla España and Luz Yadira Herrera, Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations is rooted in the simple truth that we cannot separate knowing our students from knowing their home, communities, and the people that they love. This book offers a toolkit for connecting with families and elevating the intrinsic strengths that reside in every child’s home.

Nawal Qarooni is an educator, writer, and adjunct professor who supports a holistic approach to literacy instruction and family experiences in schools across the country. Drawing on her work as an inquiry-based leader, mother, and proud daughter of immigrants, Nawal's pedagogy is centered in the rich and authentic learning all families gift their children every day. To learn more about her work, visit nqcliteracy.org or follow her on Instagram @nqarooni and Twitter @NQCLiteracy.