Learning in the community: Middle-class immigrant parent engagement and devaluation of cultural capital in schools

• In Event: Intensive Parenting Across Cultures: Global Varieties in Mobilizing Cultural Capital

Abstract

Prior research shows that parent engagement in their children’s education offers significant benefits for students’ academic success, social-emotional wellbeing, and sense of belonging in schools (Jeynes, 2012; Martinez-Yarza et al., 2024). While immigrant parents often face additional barriers to parent engagement due to lower familiarity with the new school system and linguistic challenges (Antony-Newman, 2019), they have high expectations for their children and are actively engaged in their children’s education (Ji & Koblinsky, 2009). Much of immigrant parent engagement happens at home or in the community, which makes their efforts less visible in schools (Goodall, 2018). Many middle-class immigrants bring with them economic, cultural, and social capitals (Bourdieu, 1986) that can be mobilized to the benefit of their children’s education after migration (Devine, 2009). While non-recognition of foreign credentials often leads to downward social mobility and decrease in economic capital (Guo, 2009), and disruption of social networks devalues social capital accumulated in home countries (Neri & Ville, 2008), it is embodied cultural capital that has the potential to be more readily transferred across borders and applied for children’s education because the importance of education is seen as universal across national contexts (Hanushek, 2009).
In this presentation, we use Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and Canadian qualitative data to understand whether middle-class immigrant parent engagement in the home and community domains is valued at school. We conceptualize cultural capital here as parental plurilingual repertoire (embodied state), parental education (institutionalized state), and family literacy environment (objectified state). Empirical data comes from interviews with 46 middle-class immigrant parents from 10 post-Soviet countries, whose children attend high schools in Canada and 10 Canadian high school teachers who work in linguistically and culturally diverse schools. All immigrant parents attended schools in their home countries before immigrating to Canada, the majority hold a university degree, and are mainly employed in middle-class occupations.
Findings show that parents, interviewed for this project, have relatively high levels of cultural capital. They are confident English speakers, who also use and strive to transfer their home languages to children, have a university degree, and value and encourage reading in their families. This cultural capital allows parents to be actively involved in their children’s learning at home in line with the “intensive parenting” ideal (Hays, 1996). They hire tutors, buy textbooks from home countries, send children to the countries of origin in summer and engage grandparents to learn and maintain their home languages. They also enroll their children in community cultural centers for academic enrichment and fostering hybrid cultural identity.
Is such rich home-based parent engagement valued in schools? Although teachers made some attempts to recognize immigrant students’ “funds of knowledge” (Rios-Aguilar et al., 2011) in the form of languages and cultures that they bring to class, teachers did not provide specific examples of how they value immigrant families' home-based engagement and make it visible in the classroom. This study shows that cultural capital of immigrant families is undervalued in the school system, where home-based learning remains invisible to educators.

Author

• Max Antony-Newman, University of Glasgow