Recentering the Stance and Perspective of Black and Brown Parents in Studying Educational Involvement

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Race, Power, and Parental Involvement: Naming the Limits and Drafting the Future of Contemporary Discourse and Practice

Abstract

Overwhelmingly, when scholars have endeavored to understand the nature of the involvement of parents of color in US schools, the predominant approach has been to measure their actions and orientations against that of White, middle class families who explicitly and implicitly constitute the normative referent. Scholars have less often endeavored to problematize this approach by speaking directly with parents of color to understand how their sense-making as racialized, classed, gendered, and otherwise socialized beings informs their conceptualizations about what it means to support their children in school and engage with educational institutions.

Drawing upon in depth interviews with a racially diverse set of parents attending a racially and socio-economically diverse elementary school, we re-center the perspectives of parents of color to understand how parents’ identities and experiences profoundly shape what they want from schools, what they want their children to experience in schools, and what role they see for themselves in shaping that experience. Operating from the premise that productive family-relations are founded in families’ ability to “trust” schools and teachers, such trust remains elusive in the absence of teacher dispositions and forms of engagement that accommodate these identities and experiences (Archer-Banks, & Behar-Horenstein, 2008). Our findings reveal a gulf between what Black and Brown parents expect as per their identities and experiences and what expectations teachers were inclined to accommodate.

Although all parents expressed a shared understanding of what was expected of them as parents: communication with teachers, awareness of their child’s progress, and support of school wide and classroom initiatives, clear differences emerged in discussions of what the parents wanted and needed from teachers and other school officials. While White parents were looking for teacher support in helping to make school “fun” and assist their children in discovering the “joy” of learning, Black and Brown parents were looking for teachers to provide safety from discrimination and equal opportunity for their children and to anticipate and be responsive to the racial inequities that they and their children were likely to experience outside of school. Our interviews with teachers in this same school indicated that the prospect of cultivating and sustaining the trust and good relations of White families was high because the teachers and White families had a bi-directional understanding and accommodation of each other’s expectations. In contrast, the prospect of cultivating and sustaining trust with Black and Brown families as a precursor to effective family-school relations was effectively stymied as teachers’ perspectives and practices dismissed, misinterpreted, or pathologized Black and Brown parents’ expectations of teachers.

In light of these findings, we seek to complicate the prevailing narratives that position Black and Brown families as “uninvolved” by interrogating the racialized assumptions that animate the racist ideologies, practices, and structures that permeate our schools and dismiss Black and Brown parents’ premises for and articulations of involvement. As we move toward more diverse public schools, it is critically important that we understand how to productively engage parents who have historically and educationally marginalized

Authors

• Alaina Neal-Jackson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Carla D. O'Connor, University of Michigan