“Yo trabajo con mi hijo”: The Agency and Capabilities of Latino Immigrant Parents

• In Event: Using Humanistic Economics and the Capabilities Approach to Rethink Early Childhood Educational Research, Practices, and Policies

Abstract

Immigrant parents’ voices are substantially absent from the debate and literature on parental involvement practices even when school discourses point to parents as a child’s first teacher. There are few mechanisms for schools and teachers to understand the perspectives of immigrant parents and fewer ways for immigrant parents to voice concerns and opinions about the types of classroom learning being offered to their children. This paper focuses on the perspectives of immigrant parents, particularly Latino immigrant parents living in rural and urban cities in Texas. Using the Capabilities Approach as well as the Funds of Knowledge theoretical framework, parents are repositioned as experts on their children and analyzed as having agency and capabilities to contribute to the curricular and pedagogical approaches their children experience at school.

This paper presents data from ethnographic focus groups with over thirty Latino immigrant mothers and fathers. Participating parents all had a child in first grade in Texas. Focus groups focused on their experiences having children begin school in the United States, their communication with teachers and schools and their feelings about how best to educate their young children. Data analysis included coding, content analysis and close interpretation of the readings. This data comes from the much larger Agency and Young Children project, a videocued, multivocal study of early childhood teachers, parents, children and public school administrators living and working within immigrant communities.

Findings from the focus groups with Latino immigrant parents of young children suggest that immigrant parents care deeply about their children’s education and academic success and are aware that schools and teachers often assume that they do not care. Many parents saw taken for granted practices such as centers and group lesson time as problematic and offered suggestions they believed would be more effective and culturally responsive. Parents also showed a lot of appreciation for even small gestures of communication and patience by early childhood teachers and administrators. However no parents in our study were consulted about curriculum or pedagogy in their child’s classroom. Parents often reported not having any idea about what was happening in the classroom but were embarrassed to seek this information from teachers. In one case, the school locked the classroom doors from the outside so parents could not enter. This study, particularly the method and analysis, gave immigrant parents more agency to participate in their child’s education and bring their voices to the attention of well-intentioned teachers and administrators. The presentation, aimed at early childhood educators and scholars, will focus on these findings as well as ways to use the video-cued ethnographic method and the Capabilities Approach to take seriously the ideas and perspectives of immigrant parents in early childhood education.

Author

• Kiyomi Sanchez-Suzuki Colegrove, Texas State University