“Opening Doors” Through the Capitalization of Latinx Parents’ Sociocultural Assets: Contributions of the AP/OD Program

• In Event: Parenting Programs for Young Children Around the Globe: Advances in Modalities, Culturally Sensitive Content, and Effects

Abstract

Introduction
Peoples of Latinx descent are a growing member of the U.S. population, particularly in California. Latinx students represent nearly 75% of the population in Los Angeles, home to the second largest U.S. school district. While Latinx students are a majority of students in Los Angeles Unified, they continue to lag behind their peers on key indicators of academic performance in the early years. Parent education programs have been implemented to work with families—particularly those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds—to provide parents with a suite of tools and resources designed to encourage academic success and community advocacy.
One such program, Abriendo Puertas/Opening Doors (AP/OD), is an evidence-based training program developed by and for Latinx parents with children ages 0-5, focused on topics like early childhood development, school readiness, and advocacy. Across the 10 interactive sessions, facilitators use popular education to introduce local data and adapt the program to the needs of their community.
In this study, we evaluated their implementation efforts and examined how different partner organizations engaged families and adjusted the program based on their unmet needs and funds of knowledge.

Methods
Data were collected in two phases between May, 2019 and February, 2020. During the first phase, members of 12 of Los Angeles partner institutions were invited to complete an initial 15-minute, online survey (N=75) through Qualtrics. In the second phase, following a “conceptually important case” (Weiss, 1994) purposive sampling strategy, six of these organizations were invited to participate as “key partners”. Administrators, coordinators, and facilitators from the key partner organizations (N=46) completed a 45 to 60-minute, in-depth interview focused on the participants’ personal experience with the AP/OD implementation process. Parents who had completed the AP/OD program were invited to participate in focus groups, and asked about their experiences with AP/OD, any challenges they experienced, and suggestions for improvement.
The interviews and focus groups were coded using MaxQDA. The coded segments were organized thematically in a Case-Level Meta-Matrix (Miles et al., 2014) by partner organization. Later, a Partially Ordered Meta-Matrix (Miles et al., 2014) was developed to present the most relevant data in each organization into a composite display.

Results
Similar to other parenting interventions, building caring relationships between parent educators and participants was fundamental to smooth implementation. Coordination among program staff ¬–and their competing work priorities–further supported program delivery. However, this program was unique in its use popular education for engaging parents of Latinx descent. It actively decenters dominant forms of knowledge about parenting and, instead, draws out the wealth of knowledge embedded in participants’ culture, while capitalizing their sociocultural assets. Related, particularly effective facilitators leveraged their shared experience—drawing on this wealth of knowledge and their sociocultural assets—to connect with and lead the participants. They reported having an easier time recruiting participants, building rapport faster, and more deftly addressing the participants’ needs based on their shared, lived experiences. These facilitators felt more comfortable navigating the tension between adapting the program to the community needs while maintaining fidelity to the foundational program goals.

Authors

• Monica Zegers, University of California - San Francisco
  Presenting Author

• Jeremy Martin, University of California, Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author

• Margaret Bridges, University of California - Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author