“The child is mine and he is yours too”: Hmong Parents’ Care as Educational Advocacy

• In Event: Re-imagining Equitable Inclusion: Immigrant and Refugee Parents and Youths’ Experiences of Dis-engagement

Abstract

Objective
Parent engagement is widely recognized as critical to students’ academic success (Hoover‐Dempsey et al., 2005); however, immigrant and refugee parents are often represented as not caring about their children’s schooling (Valenzuela, 1999). This paper examines how notions of care emerged among Hmong parents and youth in discussions of their equitable inclusion in educational policy and practice.

Theoretical Framework
This study draws on Valenzuela’s (1999) conceptualization of care, and the distinction between aesthetic and authentic care, to examine the way Hmong parents and youth express their desires to impact change in school decision-making processes. Valenzuela critiques the misalignment between the school’s expectation of aesthetic care where families and youth are expected to demonstrate that they care about the school in the ways that are prescribed by school staff, and authentic care that is characterized by mutual respect and reciprocity. This framework helps to understand the advocacy efforts of Hmong parents as an enactment of authentic care.

Methods & Data Sources
Drawing on a sub-set of data from the larger study (see Paper 1), this paper concentrates on two focus groups: one conducted in Hmong with Hmong parents with children in K-12 education and one with Hmong youth facilitated in English and Hmong. For qualitative data analysis, we engaged in an inductive coding process to identify themes (Saldaña, 2021) to explore the research question, how do Hmong parents and youth express, navigate, and mobilize frameworks of care?

Results
Broadly speaking, participant responses highlighted different conceptualizations of care, including the type of care Hmong parents expected from the school toward them and their children when it came to decision-making processes. This paper highlights three findings. First, Hmong parents demonstrated authentic care, or a desire for school leaders to express care by engaging with their experiences. Their framework of care included co-responsibility and mutuality for their children’s education, which conflicted with the educational system’s expectations of parental care (i.e., aesthetic care). For example, one parent explained, “The child is mine and he is yours too, because I am the parent but you are the one who teaches him. Therefore, we both must be concerned.” Second, parents also described their efforts to enact care by asserting their voices in various school spaces, even though school decision makers used school policy to sideline Hmong parent concerns and constrain their engagement. Third, Hmong youth expressed an awareness of inequitable power dynamics between school systems and their parents. They both expressed racialized ideas about dominant conceptualizations of care that framed Hmong parents as “not caring,” while also recognized the disparities in the school’s regard for their parents.

Significance
This study illuminates the ways in which Hmong parents embodied authentic care in their advocacy efforts with school and the ways in which their efforts were ultimately subverted. Additionally, it contributes to understanding how conceptualizations of (un)caring among school leaders may negatively reshape the relationship between youth and their families as youth may come to view their own parents similarly as “not caring.”

Authors

• Hetal Ascher Patel, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mariana Pacheco, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Taucia Gonzalez, University of Arizona

• Andrea Espinoza, University of Arizona

• Carlos Orozco-Wagner, University of Wisconsin - Madison