1 Teachers College Record Volume 121, 110308, November 2019, 39 pages Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University 0161-4681 Families in the Driver’s Seat: Catalyzing Familial Transformative Agency for Equitable Collaboration ANN M. ISHIMARU University of Washington JOE L. LOTT, II University of Washington KATHRYN E. TORRES Education Northwest KAREN O’REILLY-DIAZ University of Washington Context: An emerging body of research has begun to re-envision how nondominant families and communities might become powerful actors in equity-based educational change when issues of power, race, culture, language, and class are integrated into family engagement efforts. Beyond the commitment to more equitable engagement, the field offers little empirically- grounded evidence with regard to how to shift power and build collective agency, particularly in the moment-to-moment interactions that constitute the ongoing daily practice of family- school relations. Purpose of Study: We sought to understand how nondominant parents and educators could enact equitable collaboration in the school-based co-design of a parent education curriculum. We sought to better “map” the journey to transformative agency of nondominant parents by asking: What were the turning points in the emergence and evolution of transformative agency amongst nondominant parents from different racial/cultural/linguistic communi- ties? Within and across these turning points, how did parents narrate and negotiate their roles and evolve their transformative agency? Setting: The research took place in a suburban school district in the Western United States outside a major urban city, in a region of increasing suburban poverty and marked racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity.