Home-School Connections in a Multicultural Society

Learning From and With Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families

Maria Luiza Dantas, Patrick C. Manyak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415997560
• eBook ISBN: 9781135282110
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educators everywhere confront critical issues related to families, schooling, and teaching in diverse settings. Directly addressing this reality, Home-School Connections in a Multicultural Society shows pre-service and practicing teachers how to recognize and build on the rich resources for enhancing school learning that exist within culturally and linguistically diverse families.

Combining engaging cases and relevant key concepts with thought-provoking pedagogical features, this valuable resource for educators at all levels:

• Provides detailed portraits of diverse families that highlight their unique cultural practices related to schooling and the challenges that their children face in school settings
• Introduces key sociocultural and ethnographic concepts, in ways that are both accessible and challenging, and applies these concepts as lenses through which to examine the portraits
• Shows how teachers and researchers have worked with diverse families to build positive relationships and develop learning activities that incorporate children's unique experiences and resources

Disrupting deficit assumptions about the experiences and knowledge that culturally and linguistically diverse children acquire in their homes and communities, this book engages readers in grappling deeply and personally with the chapters' meanings and implications, and in envisioning their own practical ways to learn from and with families and children.

1
Introduction

Patrick C. Manyak and Maria Luiza Dantas

In this introductory chapter we introduce major themes and key concepts related to diversity, families, and schooling. To begin, we survey important previous research on families and schooling, focusing the reader’s attention on a set of overarching themes that provide a historical background for understanding the studies presented in this book. Next, we carefully define a core set of theoretical concepts, stressing that these concepts represent lenses that can help readers to see families, schooling, learning, and teaching in new ways.

Diversity, Families, and Schooling: Overarching Themes

Educators have perhaps always recognized the fact that families play a critical role in children’s schooling. However, for some 40 years, researchers have delved into the complex relationships between diverse families and schools, producing a revealing array of studies that offer insight into the ways that families differ; how families perceive school, relate to teachers, and support their children’s education; and how educators think about and relate to families (Delgado-Gaitan, 1990; Guerra, 1998; Heath, 1983; Li, 2002; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988; Valdés, 1996). In this section, we discuss four broad themes that we have distilled from this research. These themes provide a context for understanding the studies presented in this book, enabling readers to make connections between the individual chapters and important previous findings and perspectives on diverse families and schooling.

The Depth of Difference

Several seminal research studies have underscored the deep differences between families across cultures and the significant discontinuity that children from diverse cultural groups often experience as they enter school. In her highly acclaimed study of language socialization in distinct cultural communities in the Piedmont Carolinas, Heath (1983) described the vast differences in the ways that working-class African American, working-class White, and middle-class White families used language and literacy. Her rich portrait of the language experience of the African American children highlighted the fact that very young children, while constantly held and thus exposed to an ongoing stream of speech, were not talked to directly and were expected to find their own ways into adult conversation. As the children grew, adults encouraged performance-oriented modes of speech, with which the children earned their place on the public stage, but rarely asked them questions, since “children [were] not seen as information-givers or question-answers” (p. 103). These behaviors contrasted dramatically from those of the White families, who cooed over, talked to, questioned, and generally bathed young children in encouragement to speak and later “[taught] them to label items and events, to describe their features, to read books, and to play with educational toys” (p. 350). Significantly, Heath pointed out that these patterns of language use were not casual ones but rather issued from contrasting, deeply held beliefs on the nature of childhood, childrearing, and community life. Further, she demonstrated that, for the African American children, school brought a “sudden flood of discontinuities in the ways people talk, the values they hold, and the consistency with which the rewards go to some and not others” (p. 348).

In another important study of families and schooling, Valdés (1996) documented the lives of 10 Mexican immigrant families. Her research emphasized the central importance of extended family relationships, household- rather than child-centeredness, and the parents’ orientation toward raising respectful, responsible children who understood their role within the family and were prepared to contribute to its welfare. Against this backdrop, Valdés described a number of specific family practices related to children: children learned by observing and doing rather than by explicit teaching, spent nearly all of their time with siblings and cousins, and were expected to demonstrate deep respect for and obedience to their parents. In summary, Valdés concluded that the families held profoundly “familistic values” and that meant that, despite parents’ expressed belief in the importance of school, “Family activities did not center around children’s school lives, and parents’ views about their success or failure as parents were not closely tied to their children’s academic success” (p. 188).

These two studies underscore the fact that family differences across cultures are not superficial: They reflect deeply held beliefs and values and have tremendous consequences for families’ views of and children’s experience in school.

Variations in Family–School Relations

Diverse families’ cultural assumptions and personal histories powerfully shape the ways that they understand and relate to schools. Nevertheless, research has consistently discovered that diverse families place great value on schooling, particularly as a stepping-stone to economic mobility. For example, the African American parents in Heath’s (1983) study, the Mexican-American parents researched by Delgado-Gaitan (1992), and the Chinese immigrant families described by Li (2002) all expressed a deep value of schooling and clearly communicated that value to their children. However, it is also evident that families vary widely in their assumptions about schooling and the roles that they play in supporting children’s school learning.

Detailed studies of home and school settings have revealed that teachers generally want parents to actively support their children’s school learning by adopting a kind of “teacher’s helper” role (Lareau, 1989; Valdés, 1996). After examining the relationships between working- and upper-middle-class families and their children’s teachers, Lareau (1989) summarized this desire succinctly:

[T]eachers view education as a round-the-clock experience in which parents can, and should, play a role in supplementing the classroom experience by preparing children for school, reinforcing the curriculum, and showing support … by attending school events. Teachers saw an interdependency between home and school, not a separation.

(p. 35)

In contrast, Lareau found that the working-class parents viewed the school and family domains as largely separate and the teachers as having the requisite expertise, and thus as bearing the responsibility, for teaching academic skills to their children. Furthermore, in comparison to the middle-class parents in the study, Lareau stressed the working-class parents’ lack of confidence in their ability to support their children’s academic learning and their lack of information about the ways that school worked.

Valdés (1996) documented a similar separation between school and family spheres and responsibilities in her study. The Mexican immigrant families she observed understood educación, in the Mexican sense, as raising children to be respectful, obedient, and moral, a task to which they were deeply committed. However, like Lareau’s working-class parents, they viewed academic development as the responsibility of the teachers. Raising the issue of whether it was appropriate for the school to help these families change this view of their children’s schooling, Valdés poignantly argued:

The point is that if Rosario Castro, for example, were made to believe that she should read to her children every evening … or practice multiplication tables, she would do just that. She is indeed committed to her children’s schooling, and she would hope to do her best for them in spite of her many other obligations. On the other hand, she would be replacing educación in the Mexican sense with an American middle-class focus on schooling and school learning. Given the demands on her life, she perhaps would not have time to do the real teaching that Mexican mothers do … In essence, Rosario would be helping the teachers to do their jobs, but she herself would fail to do her own.

(pp. 202–203)

In her study of Mexican immigrant families in California, Delgado-Gaitan (1992) encountered a similar cultural perspective on the meaning of education. However, she also stressed the many ways that the parents provided social, motivational, and emotional support aimed at enhancing children’s success in school.

These brief portraits of working-class and Mexican immigrant families’ understanding of schooling highlight the gulf that may exist between the assumptions of culturally diverse parents and those of teachers. Research with other ethnic groups, such as Chinese immigrants (Li, 2002), has demonstrated other conflicting beliefs, understandings, and goals that can result when parents’ cultural beliefs and histories differ greatly from those of school personnel. Unfortunately, as we discuss next, these conflicts can lead teachers to view diverse families in a negative light.

Diverse Families and the Deficit Perspective

A number of research studies focused on families and schooling have demonstrated that educators may find themselves confused by families whose values and practices differ greatly from their own, and, at times, develop negative views about such families’ interest in and support of their children’s schooling (Compton-Lilly, 2003; Heath, 1983; Moll, Amanti, & González, 2005; Valdés, 1996). Valdés (1996) summarized how conflicting cultural views on the part of parents and teachers led teachers to make deficit assumptions about the Latina/o families in her study: “When children came to school without certain skills that their families, in good faith, believed the teachers should teach (e.g., the alphabet, the colors, the numbers), school personnel assumed parental indifference, troubled homes, and little interest in education” (p. 167). We refer to this tendency to make negative assumptions, judge, or criticize poor or diverse families as the deficit perspective, and like Compton-Lilly (2003), find it to be powerfully prevalent within schools that serve poor, non-White children.

To illustrate this deficit perspective in greater detail, we draw on data that Patrick Manyak collected while researching the school experience of a class of Latina/o primary grade students (Manyak, 1999). The children’s bilingual classroom teacher, Ms. Page, maintained a close relationship with many of the children’s families, valuing their unique histories and cultural practices, provided a rich instructional environment, and supported the children’s developing bilingualism. However, since the children also visited Ms. Jones’ English-only first grade classroom for integration time, Patrick observed these visits and talked with Ms. Jones regularly for a period of three months. Several times Ms. Jones, a White, middle-class, monolingual-English-speaking young teacher, acknowledged that while teachers wanted to have high expectations for the Latina/o children, “you can’t expect [them to master] the same things at the same rate.” She explained this need for lower expectations by referring to the children’s lack of stimulating experiences outside of school and the fact that they spoke only Spanish at home. Addressing the resources that children bring to school tasks, Ms. Jones stated: “I think that we rely too much on children having experiences, and sometimes not a whole lot happens in their family, nothing too great anyway. You have to give them experiences.” Thus, Ms. Jones, despite having little knowledge of the children’s families and communities, assumed that many of the Latina/o students experienced little of value outside of school. In addition to this failure to provide meaningful life experiences, Ms. Jones also suggested that the children’s families did not consider school success important. This appeared particularly true for “old world” families that only spoke Spanish to the children:

If everything is in Spanish, the family is saying that English is not the important language. How well do you want your child to do in an English-dominated society? The more they hear it—if the family uses it—the better off they will be.

This statement included several deficit-oriented assumptions. First, Ms. Jones equated the families’ use of Spanish to their devaluing of English and implied that it would have been easy for the families to switch to using English at home if they desired. In addition, she failed to recognize any redeeming value in the children’s emerging bilingualism or the important role of the parents in helping the children to develop their Spanish skills. Through informal conversations, Patrick found that many teachers at the school shared Ms. Jones’ attitude and assumptions. Fortunately, as we discuss next, researchers and teachers in many settings have worked together in ways that discredit the assumptions of the deficit perspective.

Recognizing and Building on Cultural Resources

Over the last several decades, a number of researchers have worked alongside teachers to incorporate diverse children’s home experiences and resources into meaningful classroom instruction. These projects have demonstrated that diverse children possess a broad range of cultural knowledge, linguistic abilities, and problem-solving skills that represent important resources for school learning (McIntyre, Rosebery, & González, 2001; Moll, L., Amanti, & González, 2005). In one renowned project, Moll and his colleagues (Moll et al., 2005) conducted a long-term investigation among Mexican immigrant families in Tucson, Arizona. Together with teachers, they visited families and documented the vast funds of knowledge, “socially distributed cultural resources,” that these families possessed. The researchers and teachers then worked together to create instructional units that utilized these funds of knowledge. These units produced rich contexts for students’ literacy and content learning. ...

Table of contents

• Language, Culture, and Teaching
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Home–School (Dis)connections
• Part II Curriculum Transformations
• Part III Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index