Literacy as Home: Families' Co-Constructed Reconceptualizations of Literacy and Learning in a Parent Engagement Program

• In Event: Toward Sustainable Innovations in Education

Abstract

Objectives

Parent engagement is a persistent concern in U.S. educational discourse (Mapp & Kuttner, 2013 Miller, 2015). Scholarship highlighting the social, cultural and linguistic wealth and knowledge that exists within communities suggests that parent engagement and family learning is supported when educators honor and sustain diverse literacies (Baker-Bell, 2020; Paris & Alim, 2017; Yosso, 2014). Building from this perspective, we sought to understand how spaces might be created for families to reflect upon and build their understandings of learning and literacy in order to foster agency and advocate for their children. Our study used a Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR) approach to examine how parents shared and co-constructed knowledge about learning and literacy in a multi-lingual family literacy program called “Read Make, & Play” (RMP). RMP provided parent participants with a shared set of children’s literature and games and facilitated a six-week series of multilingual dialogue sessions with parents focusing on parental inquiry, agency, and linguistic inclusivity.

Theoretical Frameworks

Our conception of literacies was informed by multiliteracies scholarship (Cope & Kalantis, 2013), which recognizes multimodal and multilingual forms of literacy and understands literacy as a meaning-making system used for social transformation. We drew upon Yosso’s (2014) notion of community cultural wealth, to explain how families shared knowledge and resources. Community cultural wealth acknowledges multiple forms of ‘wealth’ (i.e. capital) held in communities through webs of relationships, including social capital, linguistic capital, navigational capital, and familial capital.

Methods & Data Sources

We used a DBIR study design in which RMP practitioners and university faculty/students were co-researchers, as well as an iterative approach to implementation, research, and theory-building (Fishman, et al, 2013). Our participants were 32 parents of children aged 0-5 who participated in a six-week program which met once a week. 17 of the 32 parents spoke Spanish as their first language. Our data sources included a pre-and post-program survey, weekly check-in surveys, meeting observations, and individual interviews. The research team met on a bi-weekly basis to conduct preliminary inductive analysis of trends from surveys, interviews, and observations regarding participants conceptualizations of literacy, knowledge-sharing/construction, and collaboration. From this preliminary analysis, a coding framework was developed to deductively analyze the data.


Results & Significance

The results of our study give insight into the impact of this design on parents’ co-construction of knowledge about learning and literacy, and offer implications for theory development. We identified two key themes: (1) parents shifted their understandings of literacy from ‘literacy as schoolwork’ to ‘literacy as home,’ and (2) parents began to see each other as valuable resources for literacy practices. Previous research has demonstrated that when social capital is revealed and explored within communities, community members can agentively build that social capital (Van Waes, 2017). These findings demonstrate a collective uncovering of parents’ community cultural wealth. In future research we hope to study how this may impact ongoing parental engagement with schools.

Authors

• Kira J. Baker-Doyle, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Sarai Coba Rodriguez, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Andrea Vaughan, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Shawndra Allen, University of Illinois at Chicago