Working Within, Against, and Beyond the Systems That Uphold Kindergarten Readiness: Centering Families' Aspirations

• In Event: Advancing Critical Pedagogy and Praxis Across Educational Settings

Abstract

Purpose
Kindergarten readiness is understood as a set of skills that position a child for success in K-12 schooling and beyond (Iorio & Parnell, 2015). However, when defined narrowly, without consideration for children’s embeddedness within multiple contexts, “readiness” risks perpetuating a deficit narrative about minoritized families. In this presentation we will describe the development of a kindergarten transition program which centers the readiness priorities of families. The Summer Kindergarten Bridge program was developed under a community-school-university partnership initiated in response to the request for kindergarten readiness support made by local school principals.

Theoretical Framework
Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth (CCW) is used to interrogate the extent to which the program has succeeded at convening family strengths. CCW challenges deficit perspectives to center the “array of knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by communities of color” (Yosso, 2005, p. 77).

Methods & Data Sources
To understand families’ priorities in their children’s transition to kindergarten, 27 families completed surveys and nine families engaged in semi-structured interviews.

Results
What did families prioritize in preparing their children for kindergarten?
Families identified strong cognitive skills, like knowledge of letters and the alphabet, sight words, and counting, as being important. Social-emotional skills also emerged. Frequently, family-members alluded to children’s safety. For example, they suggested it was important that their child know family-members’ names, phone numbers, and addresses. In an interview, a mother shared her concern for her son’s safety walking to school.
What did families like about the Summer Kindergarten Bridge Program?

Family-members valued the opportunity for their children to learn school rules and routines. The program provided a natural opportunity for children to prepare for the affective aspects of starting school, like how to separate from family-members .
How did the families say the program could be improved?

Family-members identified problems with the half-day schedule, “The 12:30pm ending time is really tough for working families. It is a privileged thing to pick-up at that time” (Parent, Aug 2022). Another area for improvement was around integrating social justice content into the curriculum. One parent stated that she “would love to see more on racism, diversity, and inclusion in 5-year-old language” (Parent, Aug 2022).

Scholarly Significance
Families utilized aspirational capital, or the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for their children’s future, to prepare for their child's transition to school (Yosso, 2005). In contrast to deficit-based narratives about families of color living in economically marginalized contexts, families espoused hope for their children’s education and a strong commitment to their readiness (Brown & Lan, 2018). Working within and against school-centric systems that define children’s readiness posed challenges for our community-school-university partnership. Reified practices that uphold narrow definitions of readiness made it difficult to equally value the expectations of both our school partners and families. We now recognize the importance of centering families' aspirations when “working within, against, and beyond the existing systems” (Lytle et al., 2009, p. 24).

Authors

• Katie Mathew, Drexel University

• Vera J. Lee, Drexel University

• Andrea DiMola, Drexel University

• Cory Johnson, Drexel University