Deconstructing Models of Parent Involvement in Homework: An Ethnographic Case Study of Two Mexican Immigrant Mothers

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

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore why and how immigrant mothers get involved in the completion of homework- one activity in which schools often expect them to engage (Corno, 2000; Patall, Cooper, Robinson, 2009). This paper aims to critically examine the role of the school in the production of parent participation models for school literacy socialization and the restriction of parents to roles they find difficult to fulfill. The analysis draws on a language socialization approach, Street's (1993) ideological model of literacy, and Goffman's (1981) notion of the production format unit, to deconstruct the role of school-derived ideologies in literacy socialization practices during homework completion.
The participants included a mother from one family who was born in Puebla, Mexico and her US-born son in 1st grade. In the other family, participants included a mother born in Oaxaca, Mexico and her two US-born sons in Kindergarten and 1st grade. Both families live in the same Northeastern Latino Diaspora community and the children attend the same public elementary school. The school offers an English as a Second Language (ESL) and Bilingual Education program for students who have been identified as English Language Learners (ELLs). However, none of the children in this study were currently eligible for these services based upon school assessments. Both mothers speak, read, and write in Spanish, but have acquired only limited English proficiency.
The data for this case study was collected over four-month period between February and June 2014. During this time, the researcher acted as a participant observer in the homes of each of the two families on 6 weekday afternoons. The data collected includes 19 hours of audio-recorded interactions during the completion of homework and informal interviews throughout the visit. Field notes were also collected to document and analyze the language used, the topics discussed, and the inferences made by the researcher during and after the visits. Photographs were taken of the artifacts with which participants interacted (i.e. letters, report cards, worksheets, flashcards, book pages, stuffed animals, and video games) to triangulate interpretations of family discourse with the messages conveyed by the texts discussed.
The findings reveal how two Mexican-born mothers drew upon teacher evaluations of academic progress and school artifacts sent home to frame their roles in homework completion. The mothers assumed responsibility for teacher evaluations of children's "low" reading ability by soliciting help from others and by socializing their children to accurately write and read English words. As mothers and children attempted to read English spelling lists, worksheets, and books, tension frequently emerged with regard to proper word identification and pronunciation. The analyses of the production format units direct attention to the influence of English-only texts, and texts with which the children require substantial decoding assistance, in the construction of the mothers' tension-filled roles of English decoding assistant. These findings problematize policies and practices regarding rote-learning assignments, difficult book selections for homework, and English-only language education for the production of models of parent participation and literacy socialization that disempower immigrant mothers.

Author

• Meredith Byrnes, Rutgers University - New Brunswick/Piscataway