Immigrant Women’s Interactions With Their Children’s Schools: Formal Inclusion/Informal Exclusion

• In Event: The Struggle for Parent and Community Voice in Schools

Abstract

Communicating with school officials often requires from immigrant mothers critical linguistic agency. Most interactions of the participants in this study with the schools their children attended were mediated by interpreters or translators. As suggested in the participants’ narratives, more energy was devoted to finding linguistic resources than might be imagined. The significance attached to this resource by the interviewees, its centrality in achieving effective communication, and the demographic data—over 49 % of students in this southwestern school district are ELLs—stood in stark contrast to the haphazardness associated with access to this crucial resource and its invisibility, which amounted to informal exclusion. This paper draws on a set of findings from a larger collective qualitative case study.

Author

• Lilian Cibils, University of Northern Colorado