Latina/o Immigrant Parents' Ideas About Agency and Equity

• In Event: 54.060 - The Role of Agency and Control in Early Educational Equity

Abstract

This paper centers on the voices of Latino immigrant parents and their ideas of agency and equity in the education for their children in the US. When parents are asked about their thoughts on their children’s education, not only do they have important information to share, but they also provide a rationale that challenges perniciously circulated ideas about uncaring, unprepared and uninvolved Latino immigrant families (Arzubiaga, Noguerón, & Sullivan, 2009; Riojas-Cortez & Flores, 2009). This paper uses data from the Agency and Young Children Project and highlights immigrant parents' ideas of agency that their young children need to experience and enact in order to develop their own interests, learn how to make good choices, and enjoy their freedom.

This paper uses Adair’s (2014) conceptualization of agency that students enact their agency in the classroom to expand and show their capabilities. Also, it draws on subaltern theory (Spivak, 1988, 1996) to conceptualize the idea of dialogue in which participants must engage in listening and speaking to have a chance for reciprocal communication. Finally, it draws on Funds of Knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll & Amanti, 2005) in recognition that Latino immigrant parents have information, resources and experiences they use to understand, survive and interact in their new surroundings in the context of the US school system. Latino immigrant parents need to be part of the conversation regarding their children’s education, especially in the early years.

This paper draws on data from the Agency and Young Children Project, a video-cued ethnographic study (Tobin, Hsueh & Karasawa, 2009; Tobin, Wu & Davidson, 1989) of Latino immigrant families in California and Texas. I conducted fourteen focus groups interviews with Latino immigrant parents of young children who attended rural and urban schools in the early childhood years.

Findings indicate that Latino immigrant parents’ ideas about agency center around children making choices at school and at home. Agency is positive when it supports their children development of interest in learning, and provides opportunities for children to learn how to make good choices early in life. Parents who were interviewed believed that having opportunities to make choices early in life helped their children become adults who are responsible, good human beings and who conduct themselves within positive cultural value frameworks.

The contribution of this paper to the symposium is to privilege the perspective of Latino immigrant families, a perspective that is often missing. It is important to argue for spaces in early childhood in which children of immigrants have the opportunities to enact their agency to develop their interest and practice making choices. We know that in their classroom these opportunities are limited and children have little opportunities to show their capabilities and enact their agency. Latino immigrant children and children of immigrant can benefit for spaces in which agency takes a more central role as a pedagogical and curricular goal making those spaces more equitable and just.

Author

• Kiyomi Sanchez-Suzuki Colegrove, Texas State University