Where Is "Power" in Parental Empowerment? Institutionalized Discourses and Latina Immigrant Women's Intersectional Experiences of Advocacy and Empowerment in Northern California

• In Event: 72.026 - Decentering Parental Involvement: Critical Examinations of Race, Class, Gender, and Immigration in U.S. Home–School Relationships

Abstract

Educational advocacy and parental engagement (PE) are fundamental ideological discourses in current educational in the U.S. At the heart of these discourses is the belief that parents of non-dominant groups need to be “empowered” in order to be “full participants” in the education of their children. But empowerment has become a “buzzword” in parental involvement programs (Nachshen, 2004), used for its rhetorical power—especially when directed at traditionally marginalized communities (Kordesh, 1995). Despite constant efforts to “increase parent participation,” parent advocacy and empowerment in Special Education have received little interrogation, and its practice has been neither empirically nor theoretically understood. For instance, while traditional literature has framed PE as occurring between homes and schools, this study shows that advocacy and empowerment discourses in Special Education are produced in parents’ interactions with parent-led nonprofit organizations and state-run advocacy agencies. While an emergent body of research has explored the role of community-organizing in PE (Mapp, 2012; Delgado-Gaitan, 2001) we know little about the interactions between immigrant mothers and this network of organizations that fill the gap between the ideal “home-school partnership” of federal policy (NCLB Title I, 2001; IDEA, 2004) and the advocacy reality of special education.
Drawing on 20-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, this paper analyzes the discourses of two parent-led nonprofit organizations and the lived experience of power of 13 Spanish-speaking immigrant Latino women with children with disabilities. The paper answers the following questions: What notions of advocacy and empowerment are made available in these advocacy agencies for Spanish-speaking families? How do the participant-mothers experience the idea of empowerment in educational advocacy trainings?
Data includes participant observation and audio-recording of advocacy trainings, interviews with Spanish-speaking mothers and professional advocates, and relevant artifacts. My research is informed by feminist scholarship exploring parental involvement and its intersections with race, gender, and class (Cooper, 2007; Griffith & Smith, 2005) as well as from critical sociocultural approaches to learning (Nasir & Cooks, 2009).
In this paper I present two main findings: First, I reveal that there exist two co-occurring discourses of advocacy generating a bifurcation of consciousness (Smith, 1987) for the participants: one as an unproblematic continuation of already existing parenting practices and second, a view of educational advocacy as a professionalization of parenting. Second, I describe three ways that mothers interacted with notions of empowerment and advocacy. This analysis shows that contrary to the naturalized language of institutionalized discourse of empowerment and PE, the lived-experiences of advocacy by the participants was labor-intensive and shaped by intersections of gender, immigration, language, and class. What’s more, the paper shows that empowerment is used to refer to an increase on mothers’ sense of self-efficacy and not to refer to an increase in the real power to change things at the school or district level.
This paper interrogates the notion of empowerment through the lived-experience of power by Spanish-speaking mothers of children with disabilities. This research offers a critique to empowerment parental involvement programs that offer “knowledge” to individual parents instead of school-community-wide empowerment and structural change.

Author

• Irenka Dominguez-Pareto, University of California