Understanding Family Contributions to Learning Through Children’s Eyes: A qualitative study of the experiences of immigrant families

• In Event: Integration and migration

Proposal

Families have always been involved in the learning of children in a variety of contexts long before the advent of widespread formalized schooling. Yet, with the spread of formalized schooling, the responsibility of educating children shifted to teachers and schools, (Coleman, 1968) to the point today where in many cases the public conception of family involvement in schooling and learning has been reduced to homework help (assigned by the school) and attending meetings at school. After some debate about whether school or family are the biggest determiners of educational attainment, most educational scholars now believe it is the complex relationship between home and school that drive educational attainment (Alexander, 2016). Despite this understanding, today’s schools still try to encourage, control and standardize the way that parents are involved in their children’s schooling (Baquedano-López, Alexander, & Hernandez, 2013) and these efforts on the part of the school typically ignore the ways families contribute to nonformal student learning. There has been continuous debate about how and why parents should be involved in student learning, and on whose terms, and yet there is a lack of consensus in the debate about the involvement of families in education or schooling, its benefits for educational outcomes and possible forms of involvement for families.
Current models of family involvement in schools typically provide a specific, school sanctioned, way for families to be involved in schools and their children’s learning, many going so far as to create documents or contracts outlining the ways in which families should behave (Nakagawa, 2000). This model often disadvantages certain students and families, often those who need the most support (Nakagawa, 2000). In addition, schools often discuss family engagement in schooling, which includes activities such as homework help (Epstein, 1995) that support the education in schools, but fail to acknowledge the learning that happens outside of school, in context, that families so often support. This paper draws a distinction between schooling, defined here as education in school, and learning defined here as education in authentic contexts outside of school. Families who do not, or cannot, conform to school prescribed mode of engagement in schooling are further disadvantaged because often schools do not understand or acknowledge the ways that families contribute to learning outside of school (Baquedano-López et al., 2013). This research project seeks to understand the ways families, particularly immigrant families disadvantaged by the current system and expectations, engage in schooling and learning. This paper will draw heavily on Moll, Ananti, Neff and Gonzalez’s (1992) Funds of Knowledge, a theory that encourages the use of household and community resources to improve instruction. By discovering what families already know and are teaching their children, schools and teachers can build on these experiences in the classroom, encouraging family involvement on the family’s terms, based on their funds of knowledge(Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992).
Much research has been done to understand the ways that families and schools interact. What makes this study unique is that it brings in the perspective of children and tries to understand the way their family supports schooling and learning. This study will be conducted in October- December 2018 with students in a small public school that serves students in pre-K through grade eight, situated in a small coastal town in the northeast of the United States to learn more about the ways that families support schooling and learning. The students chosen for this study are six elementary students whose parents are immigrants and did not attend primary or secondary school in the United States. This study will seek to answer two questions:
1. According to immigrant students, how do family members support their formal education in an elementary school?
2. What do immigrant families do to support non-formal learning of elementary students as reported by their children?
This project will focus on immigrant families because for many of these families the barriers to engaging in schooling and learning in a way that is acknowledged by the school are especially steep (Gonzalez, 2005). In addition to common obstacles such as inflexibility of work schedule or language barriers, many parents and caretakers who were educated in the school system of another country have very different expectations and understandings of the role of families in the school and the relationship of the teacher to the family based on their own experiences in school (Inger, 1992 as cited in Gonzalez, 2005).

Author

• Brittany Kenyon, Teachers College, Columbia University