Parents and Whānau as Experts in Their Worlds: Valuing Family Pedagogies in Early Childhood

• In Event: Imagining Possible Worlds With Young Children, Families, and Teachers: Sustaining Language/s and Family Pedagogies

Abstract

Growing tension within the early childhood care and education (ECCE) sector of Aotearoa New Zealand around the role teachers might play in preparing children to be successful in school suggests that notions of readiness are gaining traction (Moss, Dahlberg, Grieshaber, Mantovani, May et al., 2016). In this paper, we draw on data from three empirical studies to contest deficit assumptions about children and families whose linguistic and cultural everyday experiences are distant from what is privileged in school, and increasingly, in early childhood settings (Souto-Manning, 2018). We reject dominant Eurocentric language socialization practices that encourage parents to privilege quantifiable language experiences and position parents to prioritize contrived, linear forms of interaction to improve educational outcomes for their children. Across reports of three qualitative studies, we center parents as experts in the lives of their children to validate the linguistically and culturally diverse ways families and whānau in Aotearoa New Zealand engage with their children in order to challenge the encroaching reductionist notion of the language gap (Avineri et. al, 2015).
The first study explored young children’s experiences, opportunities, and challenges of learning in more than one language in their early years in four diverse early childhood settings where children made use of their total language resources for learning. Insights into what might be considered as ‘valued outcomes’ by participating families, teachers, and children were documented. The study used a mixed-methods approach overarched by a “transformative-emancipatory paradigm” (Siraj-Blatchford, 2010), applying funds of knowledge and an additive bilingual approach to learning in more than one language.
The second study highlights the everyday practices of newly settled families in Aotearoa New Zealand who attended an intercultural early childhood playgroup and what they valued in their homes and communities. Data from semi-structured and photo-elicitation interviews in heritage languages and observational fieldnotes inform the ways families worked to sustain their everyday practices and supported emerging transcultural dispositions and competencies (Orellana, 2016) as their children encountered new ways of knowing and being.
The third study employed a qualitative, case-study design including interviews using video- stimulus recall methods to uncover insights into the rich, multimodal ways in which one-year-old toddlers co-constructed stories in both family home and early care and childhood settings in a culturally and linguistically diverse community of Aotearoa New Zealand.
In each of these studies, we highlight what families care about, the linguistic and cultural knowledges of families and the intimate understanding families have of their children. We also draw on these studies to illustrate what children carry with them between home and their early childhood settings that contribute to how they negotiate the worlds they inhabit. Finally, we affirm the role of early childhood educators to enact culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2014) in order to disrupt normative assumptions of early childhood that privilege a Eurocentric worldview tied to standard English monolingualism, and to create space for the pedagogies of children’s families and homes.

Authors

• Mary (Meg) M. Jacobs, Auckland University of Technology

• Amanda White, University of Auckland

• Nola Harvey, University of Auckland