Indigenous Maya Parents Introducing Discourses and Literacies of Migration at an Elementary School in Northern California

• In Event: 60.040 - Relationships Between Schools and Immigrant Families: Addressing Junctures and Disjunctures

Abstract

Our objectives in this paper are to present preliminary findings of a three-year ethnographic study at an elementary school in San Francisco, California. We identify and examine the language socialization and educational experiences of a growing community of immigrant indigenous students and their families from rural communities in Yucatan, Mexico. We focus on a range of negotiations that parents carried out with school staff when school activities followed an approach that challenged existing relations of power and gave parents the opportunity to use and generate content knowledge that socialized their children to issues of concern to this population, including migration, citizenship status, ethnic and racial identity, and the challenges and opportunities of transnational living. We discuss this repositioning of knowledge as a decolonial act (Author et al., 2014).

We draw on a language socialization theoretical perspective which considers schools, classrooms, and other educational settings (including the home) as interdependent and interrelated parts of a broader process of communicative competence acquisition (Author, 2002). This perspective seeks to understand the ways practices of classrooms and schools reflect and constitute broader sociocultural structures, including ideologies of power and expectations about parents in the education of their children.

We also engage a strand of parent involvement research that advocates for a different understanding of involvement in schools so that that parents from diverse economic, linguistic, and racial backgrounds have a more direct influence on the curriculum and school-based decisions beyond limiting roles (Author et al., 2013; Dyrness, 2011). We are also interested in examining how schools create a space of intersubjectivity and engage a politics of visibility for this new immigrant community (DeLugan 2010).

Given our theoretical and methodological lens on everyday language analysis, our method includes video- and audio-recorded classroom instruction, activities in the school’s after-school program, and participation in public school events. Relatedly, our approach is participatory as we have been participating and partnering with school staff and parents on a number of school activities. We have conducted observations and recordings in four classrooms across two grades and observed these students’ socialization into school culture and events. We analyzed these and other cultural materials as part of our case study of this K-5 school’s early grades (first and second).

Our preliminary findings suggest that families’ participation in the workshops facilitated a different commitment when parents took on leadership roles. For example, they engaged the topic of migration, more specifically, family migration, and turned their art projects into opportunities to socialize their children and each other to experiences and literacies of migration, citizenship, and the identification of transnational and diaspora living.

In addition to expanding the research on parent involvement, this study also engages enduring questions of concern on children’s first contact with educational institutions is formative of their future success, continuities and discontinuities between home and school, and indigenous students in school. No educational study to-date has looked longitudinally at the target population of this study and thus we know very little about these students’ educational opportunities in schools.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Gabriela Borge Janetti, University of California - Berkeley