Developing Conscientization through Dialog and Healing Relationships between Latine Immigrant Parents, Teachers, and Researchers

• In Event: Ethnographic Research for Repair, Liberation, and Community Empowerment in Early Childhood Settings

Abstract

Purpose: In today’s sociopolitical context, not all families have the same influence on teaching and learning; schools rarely seek the input of Latine immigrant parents (LIP; Author, 2019). This is an inequity we have tried to address in over a decade of research using the multivocal video-cued ethnographic method (VCE; Adair, 2014; Tobin et al., 1989) to interview children, parents, and educators. After focus groups with LIPs in particular, we consistently reflected that it may be very powerful and healing to find a way to capture and share the parent focus group experience directly with teachers. We decided to extend the VCE method to create a second parent film to showcase parents’ knowledge, and values about their children’s education. This paper showcases this extension of VCE method and how it pushes back on the hegemonic forces that distance immigrant parents from teachers to instead build and repair that relationship.
Theoretical framework: We draw on a funds of knowledge framework (Gonzalez et al., 2005) and Freire’s (2009) conceptualization of dialogue and conscientization to center LIPs’ voices in a dialogic experience with teachers as a conscientization process of their positionality, ideas, and practices.
Method: We extended the VCE method by filming video-cued parent focus groups and editing that footage into a twenty-minute film in which parents talked about their ideas about pedagogy, the importance of helping their children maintain Spanish, and what they wish teachers understood about working with families. We then used this film to prompt ESL/bilingual preK to 3rd-grade teacher focus group interviews to generate dialogue and explore teacher attitudes and practices around Latine immigrant families, their home language practices, and children’s capabilities.
Participants and sites. We recruited 64 LIPs and 21 ESL/bilingual preK to 3rd-grade teachers in the California Bay Area, Central Texas, and the Texas U.S.-Mexico border.
Data sources. We used this film to prompt focus group interviews with ESL/bilingual preK-3rd grade teachers. To measure the impact of the dialogic experience, each teacher participated in an interview 3 months later.
Data analysis. We followed a grounded theory approach (Creswell, 2003) to analyze teacher focus group interviews and teacher follow up interviews to examine how teachers' attitudes and practices were shaped by the dialogic experience and the nature of conscientization.
Substantiated methodological insights: The parent film vividly illustrated to teachers that LIPs had sophisticated, theory-supported ideas, and practical suggestions about how children learn and develop. Watching the film shifted teachers' discussion of parents to a strength-based perspective and prompted them to think about how their pedagogy could more closely reflect parents’ preferences and values. This dialogical experience helped teachers to be concious of the previous and evolving knowledge about their students and families.
Scholarly significance: This method is grounded in authentic opportunity for dialogue across time and space that centers LIPs' knowledge - a rare practice in previous research focused on parent-school partnerships that typically center white middle-class values. We see this process as an important step to begin the work of repairing the relationship between LIPs and schools.

Authors

• Molly E. McManus, San Francisco State University

• Kiyomi Sanchez-Suzuki Colegrove, Texas State University

• Christian E. Zuniga, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley