Comparisons on Early Educations’ Cultural Negotiations From an Activity Theoretic Approach

• In Event: Which Public Do Public Schools Serve? Critical Ethnographic Perspectives on Home-School Connections in Schooling

Abstract

The study focused on socialization concerns related to the education of young children from non-dominant groups. Banks et al., argue schools’ strategies should ensure that decision-making is widely shared and that school communities learn collaborative skills and dispositions in order to create an equitable environment. Home-school negotiations were studied in order to include non-dominant groups in decision making and to develop communities with ample repertoires of collaborative practices. Initially the study’s purpose was to identify parents’ and teachers’ patterns and differences in negotiating and addressing socialization concerns. This was done by focusing on the construction of socialization concerns within school parental involvement activities.

The study was framed within Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT; e.g. 2009). From this perspective, teachers and parents’ discourses are always under construction. Discussions about how children are/should be socialized are social processes. They are collective processes bound to a specific time and place, historically specific, and collectively developed. Conceptualizing preschool/kindergarten as a contact-zone, the study was designed as a contrastive analysis in three sites: Phoenix, Guatemala, and Madrid. For children from non-dominant groups preschool/kindergarten was one of the first institutional core-to-contact-zones (Hermans, 2001) where struggles between creating national identity and fostering differences were enacted.

Data collection comprised two phases: first, focus groups with stakeholders, including immigrant, refugee and natives, using sociodramatic vignettes as stimulus. Vignettes captured, for example, an undocumented mother’s hesitations around participation in teacher-parent meetings. Two related activity systems were accessed as prominent dilemmas unfolded. Both orientations and teacher-parent conferences exposed dilemmas around language of instruction and the embodied socialization concern in regard to integration and loss of roots. Analysis of transcribed text followed Tobin, Wu and Davidson (1989) content analysis and interpretive approach which was developed further for Children Crossing Borders. During the second phase, results were shared with participants within dialogues where the shared object of activity or socialization concern was articulated and negotiated.

Social activism (Banks, 1997) around the articulation and negotiation of socialization concerns occurred as parents reformulated the purposes of their participation in schools and thought critically about the issues from the perspectives of different populations. The significance includes understandings about when articulations and negotiations reached impasses. Findings inform practice and advocacy for non-dominant groups. The scholarly significance of the study lies in that the analysis develops a theoretical model grounded in both macro and local enactments of parental involvement negotiations.

References

Banks, J. (1997). Approaches to multicultural curriculum reform. In J. Banks, & C. A. Banks, Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives, 3rd ed. (pp. 229-250). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons .

Engeström, Y. (2009). The Future of Activity Theory: A Rough Draft. In Sannino, A., Daniels, H. & Gutiérrez, K. D. Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hermans, H. J.M. (2001). The dialogical self: Toward a theory of personal and cultural positioning. Culture & Psychology, 7, 3, 243-281.

Tobin, J. J., Wu, D.Y.H. & Davidson, D.H. (1989) Preschool in Three Cultures – Japan, China and The United States. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Author

• Angela E. Arzubiaga, Arizona State University