"You Help Them, You Don't Skip People": The Value of Helping for Latino Immigrant Parents

• In Event: 33.053 - Intersections of Immigration and Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Despite the growing demographics of immigrant families in the U.S., many schools fail to understand the perspectives of immigrant parents (Arzubiaga, Noguerón & Sullivan, 2009). Immigrant parents have limited venues to voice their concerns and opinions about the education of their young children (Tobin, Arzubiaga & Adair, 2013). Using Spivak’s (1998) subaltern writings and Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti’s (2005) Funds of Knowledge, this paper argues that immigrant parents have strong values and understanding of what young children should be learning at school without appropriate amounts of voice and power to share them or have them affect what happens at school.

This presentation draws upon focus group interview data with 30 Latino immigrant parents collected as part of the comparative, video-cued ethnographic study, Agency and Young Children (AYC). This AYC study focuses on ideas about agency and developing capabilities from Development Economics (Sen, 1999; Adair, 2014). Parent participants were interviewed in rural, border and urban school sites throughout Texas. They were asked to watch a video of a first grade classroom serving mostly children of immigrants that highlighted children having a lot of agency and exploratory learning experiences. After watching the video, parents shared what they liked and didn’t like about the classroom and whether they believed the practices and attitudes in the film would be good for their own children. As researchers, we asked them to point out types of agency or choices they recognized and whether they believed such levels of choice and decision-making was good for young children. Then parents were asked to tell us what kinds of capabilities they believed were most important for young children to develop in the early grades.

Latino immigrant parents’ views of agency and what kinds of capabilities they believed were important for young children to develop differed across sites and by the educational and economic situations of the families in the study. In this paper, we focus on “helping each other” as a capability immigrant parents said young children needed to develop at school in order to become gente de bien (good people). We also found that Latino immigrant parents believed helping others was a method of collaboration and group participation that ultimately was important for networking and survival. Although most parents told us they had relatively little voice in their child’s schooling experience, they shared strong opinions and ideas about what kinds of schooling practices they wanted for their children. This is significant because it demonstrates that immigrant parents can have strong opinions about practices even when they don’t share them with the schools. After sharing findings from the Latino immigrant parent participants in the AYC study, we discuss the need for more justice-oriented mechanisms for immigrant parents to share what they know about their children and what they value about early childhood education, regardless of how it might disrupt traditional practice and discourses. We will begin the presentation with clips from the film shown to Latino immigrant parents in the AYC study. Then we will outline findings from the focus group data.

Authors

• Kiyomi Sanchez-Suzuki Colegrove, Texas State University

• Jennifer Keys Adair, The University of Texas - Austin