Undoing "Parent Involvement": Perspectives of Turkish Immigrant and Burmese Refugee Parents

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 72
  In Roundtable Session: Parent Involvement in Refugee and Immigrant Families

Abstract

While educational policies value home-school collaboration, many parent involvement frameworks still follow a Eurocentric perspective with White middle-class cultural rituals and deficit-perspective towards culturally diverse parents, especially immigrant parents. In this paper, I utilize data from two case-studies focusing on experiences of immigrant parents with their children’s early schooling, a case of 18 Turkish-American immigrant parents and a case of 28 Burmese refugee parents and cross-analyze the data to describe complex home-school interactions . Findings illustrate that despite differences in educational and financial attainment, all parents struggled with similar institutional challenges, often disguised as linguistic and cultural barriers. The paper informs teachers and school leaders about immigrant and refugee parents’ experiences with primary classrooms and provides implications for home-school collaboration.

Author

• Zeynep Isik-Ercan, Rowan University