When There Is No Choice: Family Resource Centers and Advocacy Training for Spanish-Speaking Families With Children With Disabilities in Northern California

• In Event: 25.023 - Neoliberal Policies and Family Engagement: New Perspectives, New Contexts

Abstract

Parent and family engagement policy and research in special education draw heavily on the same neoliberal imaginary of individual rights, empowerment through choice and capacity building that defines regular education. Despite these rousing goals, parental involvement and advocacy provisions in special education unwittingly promote educational inequalities among families (Leiter, 2004; Mlawer, 1993; Ong-Dean, 2009; Trainor, 2010). This is because services, in practice, have become dependent on parents’ “capacity” to advocate for their children, that is, on their economic, cultural, and social capital. Trying to solve this gap, policy-makers have increasingly emphasized the role of networks of parent organizations and family resource centers to provide support and training to families to “build their capacity” to advocate for their children with disabilities. But, what does it mean to build capacity in the context of class and racial/ethnic inequities in special education services and programs?

To examine this question, I analyze data from a larger two year multi-sited ethnography in Northern California. In this study, I investigated the discourse of educational advocacy and its sociopolitical context, social organization, and lived experience by Spanish-speaking Latina women with children with disabilities. Data sources include participant observation in non-profit organizations for parents, in-depth interviews with 13 mothers and 5 paid-advocates as well as audio-recording of parent trainings and educational conferences for Latino families, and educational artifacts provided to parents.

In this paper, I examine how two key non-profit organizations in the area represent the need for advocacy and the role of families vis-à-vis special education. I explore the kinds of advocacy identity/ies that are afforded—or not afforded—by these advocacy trainings and in these advocacy worlds and investigate what role does attention to race/ethnicity and gender play in their parent education programs. In my analysis, I draw on conceptual and methodological tools from critical scholarship in education (Lipman, 2010; Baquedano Lopez, Alexander, & Hernandez, 2013; Wilson, 2007, 2009) and Marxist, Black, and Chicana Feminisms (Collins, 1994, 2000; Smith, 1990; Villenas, 2014). My work is informed by the large body of literature on the field of parental involvement and advocacy in both regular and special education (Epstein & Sanders, 2000; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Trainor, 2010).

The analysis indicates that there are lived contradictions in the definition and practice of advocacy that have important consequences for families. Despite aiming to empower and to be inclusive, the absence in the trainings of any discussions about race/ethnicity, gender, and class inequalities in children’s access to services leave the social and political sources of such of the problem unexplored. Implications for policy and practice will be discussed.

Author

• Irenka Dominguez-Pareto, University of California