Meeting Educational Challenges for Indigenous Mixtec Families of Young Children in California: A Community Approach

• In Event: Addressing the Educational, Cultural, and Linguistic Challenges of Indigenous Mexican Students in California

Abstract

For Indigenous Mexican communities in California, young children and their families face many educational challenges (Mines 2009). Teachers do not speak the home language of the children. Children also experience discrimination from peers in the schools. As children lose their home language, the ability of parents to socialize their young children is severely challenged, and children can lose their connection to their communities (Ochs & Schieffelin 1986; Wong Fillmore 1996).

This paper describes an ethnographic study conducted as part of a project aimed to help children of an indigenous Mixtec community in Central California preserve and honor their home language and use their community’s language and literacy practices as a basis for learning literacy skills in English and Spanish, by bringing the community's language and literacy practices into local area Head Start preschool classrooms and by bringing women of the community in to teach the children. Specifically, university researchers trained bilingual Mixteco-Spanish women of the community already trained by a local community organization as health outreach workers specifically through an Early Childhood Education (ECE) course, and placed these community women in local area Head Start preschool classrooms as teacher aides-in-training to teach the community’s children.

As part of the ethnography, interviews of the community women of one another and of other parents were conducted. In addition, the researchers videotaped pretend plays, story dictations, and other peer-peer and teacher-student classroom interactions naturally occurring in the Head Start preschool classrooms where the women were placed, particularly literacy related activities.

This paper reports analysis of the videos of children’s interactions with the community women and with one another in the classroom. We identified episodes of literacy activity in which children used Mixteco language practices or made topicalized references to Mixteco and/or other languages. The framework used to analyze these practices was language socialization theory (Ochs & Schieffelin 2012). Examples showed initial reluctance on the part of young preschool children to use Mixteco in the classroom when the community women were first placed there. However, the presence of the women, and their introduction of literacy activities (Mixtec stories, counting) seemed to strengthen the use of Mixteco. Mixtec children increasingly showed interest in Mixteco, asking for the Mixteco names of colors, numbers, animals, and foods, and even how to write Mixteco. Non-Mixtec peers in the class also showed these forms of interest in Mixteco. Placing Mixtec women as teachers in California preschool classrooms and having them conduct literacy activities (counting, story-telling) in Mixteco seemed to change the indexical associations for the languages in the eyes of Mixtec children and their peers (Authors 2010; Paugh 2012; Schieffelin 2003). This study suggests ways in which communities can be empowered to build their own capacity in preschool education and in which educators can set the stage for strengthening school-home connections and educational pathways for indigenous Mixtec children.

Authors

• Amelia Kyratzis, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Jacqueline Kemp, University of California - Santa Barbara