Linking Families, Learning, and Schooling

Parent–Researcher Perspectives

Bobbie Kabuto, Prisca Martens, Bobbie Kabuto, Prisca Martens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135009564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Parents who are also educational researchers have access to a domain that is highly complex and not always available to other scholars. In this book, parent-researchers provide theoretical and practical insights into children's learning in the home and at school. Readers are given a window into learning in the home context and how all family members organize or engage in that learning. Working on two levels, the book develops scholarly discussions about learning in the home (how is it organized, who the participants are, and what children are learning), and it illustrates the impacts that outside institutions, in particular schools, have on families It is unique in showcasing parent-research as a type of research paradigm with particular aspects and challenges. Both teachers and researchers can learn from these studies as they show the impact that schooling has on families and how institutional discourses and beliefs can both positively and negatively affect the dynamics of any family.

1
Introduction

Bobbie Kabuto and Prisca Martens

Everyday Families, Everyday Learning

Researchers and scholars in the fields of family studies, family science, human development, and education have devoted a considerable amount of time to the study of families and what makes them work. The term “family” is a socially constructed and culturally defined concept. The ideological underpinning of the definition of family has traditionally defined it as a unit composed of a mother, a father, and their children. In recent years, the construct of “traditional” families is being challenged politically, socially, religiously, and culturally, as social trends see more people viewing cohabitation as an option over marriage, raising children in single-family homes, and raising children within same-sex partnerships. The effects of biological research and adoption are also changing the face of family composition as gray areas of who is defined as a “mother” or “father” within such instances continue to provide heated debates among the public sectors.

Families are also becoming more culturally diverse and international. According to a study conducted through the Pew Research Center, interracial marriages, or marriages between spouses of different races or ethnicities, have increased (Taylor, Passel, Wang, Kiley, Velasco, & Dockterman, 2010). Fifteen percent of all marriages conducted in the United States in 2010 were reported as interracial marriages, as compared to 3% in 1980. Consequently, children from these unions are potentially growing up cross-culturally and/or transnationally, meaning that they live in another country part of the year. Children who fall under this category are developing biracial identities and, as part of the process of developing these identities, they are being socialized in more than one language in the home. The lines that separate race and ethnicity are becoming blurred as families are redefining everyday cultural practices that no longer link them to certain groups of people.

Arguing that a one-size-fits-all model of families does not work, scholars in the field of anthropology continually argue that concepts such as “family,” “childhood,” and “learning” are difficult to define because of the tendency to base our definitions on American views and values instead of examining the cultural variations in how families actively construct themselves and interact with their children (Montgomery, 2009; Rogoff, 2003; Ronka & Korvela, 2009; Tudge, 2008). Scholars argue that placing “cultural activity” as the unit of focus in the study of families highlights the extent to which families function and perform activities in everyday actions and routines, as both individuals and collective family members utilize cultural resources to engage in social activities (Daly, 2003; Rogoff, 2003; Tudge, 2008). From the plethora of studies based on cross-cultural, ethnographic, and naturalistic research, there are clear indications that child socialization, learning, and the notion of family are not universal and are highly dependent on cultural living and learning contexts. How families are constructed and the roles of mother, father, and child are not universal ones that need to be fulfilled in order for families to operate and children to learn effectively. In fact, the exploration of child learning ought to address the family as a whole—how the roles of all members create an emotional context within the family, the types of routines in which they engage, and how parents and children together co-construct the home learning context (Ronka & Korvela, 2009). This point is particularly important when we consider the role of parents in researching their children and the role that the research places on the family dynamics.

While not traditional ethnographies, the parent–research studies that are discussed in this book build on the spirit of ethnographic traditions that place culture and observation at the center of their work. By doing so, these studies provide insights into the life experiences of their child-participants and the complexity to which daily activities are constructed through a cultural framework. Taking an ethnographic perspective to view this collection of work comes together to highlight that everyday family life does not have distinct boundaries where roles and identities of all family members are separated. Instead, everyday life is influenced by a complex intersection of outside forces, and spillover between these forces can occur. On the parent side, there is a strong connection between work and home as the parents in this book are also academic researchers who view their children in their academic frames of reference. Sometimes, their children’s behaviors challenged what they “thought should be.” Other times, the schools’ positionings of their children as either successful or struggling conflicted with how they viewed their children in the home. In either event, the parents held knowledge, which they did not leave at the door when they came home, that allowed them to be more than passive bystanders in constructing their children’s learning in and out of school and in advocating for their family identity. In addition, there are also school–home connections resulting from their children bringing their experiences from school into the home, and parents reacting to these experiences. The results of parental reactions can shift how learning is organized in the home to either counter or support the beliefs of schooling.

In addition, taking an ethnographic perspective illustrates how these parent– researchers addressed and organized learning in time and space. These insider views to child learning illustrate how learning did not always take place in formal contexts. Instead, children may have engaged in valuable learning experiences in the car ride to dance class, when drawing with a sibling, or when singing a song to the radio. Through an ethnographic framework, the time and space boundaries in naturalistic learning become blurred and do not necessarily mirror those of formal learning. Not only does redefining learning through expanding our notions of time and space become part of the equation when discussing engagements with learning activities, but also the use of cultural materials suggests that naturalistic learning arises through meaningful engagement with everyday items. For instance, Erin Miller in Chapter 3 discusses how she collected data when her children were at Sunday school, in the car ride listening to music, and at dance lessons. Miller writes in Chapter 3, “I had no idea when initiating this study that the conversations that occurred in my car as I drove the children to and from various locations would be so revealing or salient to my understandings.” Furthermore, Bobbie Kabuto in Chapter 2 discusses how everyday items such as crayons, toys in the kitchen set, or highlighters take on renewed roles for children as they employ these everyday items to their own means as they construct learning experiences. Sometimes, these types of items are not as valued in formal learning contexts.

It is important to note that these ideas build on a body of research using ethnographies and ethnographic perspectives to research. Shirley Brice Heath (2002) argues, “Learning [is] a full-time human activity without physical barriers of walls, doors, and fences or arbitrary limits imposed by age, gender, race, class, and geography… learning [is] unrestricted by time and place” (p. vii). Heath’s statement is supported by a plethora of studies that document children’s literacy lives in their homes and communities, outside the walls and doors of school. These studies all reveal that children of all ages enter school as knowledgeable, experienced readers and writers. While the focus of some studies is primarily on children and their literacy learning processes (e.g., Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Goodman, 1980; Harste, Woodward, & Burke, 1984), others document the literate environments of homes and children’s literacy learning in that context.

In the 1980s, for example, Denny Taylor (1983; Taylor & Dorsey-Gaines, 1988) ethnographically documented the literacy of families from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, including children’s uses of reading and writing through authentic social experiences situated in their daily lives. Taylor found that children learned literacy because they could not avoid it; it was central to their existence, regardless of race, sex, and socio-economic status. The families used reading and writing for such purposes as to gain or give information, maintain social relationships, support their memories, and survive in their everyday world. While “literacy [was] a part of the very fabric of family life” (Taylor, 1983, p. 87), the ways the families and children used literacy and its role in their lives proved to be idiosyncratic, providing the children with multiple paths to become readers and writers (Goodman, 1997; Taylor, 1983).

In the 1990s, Luis Moll and his colleagues worked in Latino communities in the Southwest (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005; Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). They documented the household knowledge families used to work, communicate, and survive and found flexible multi-stranded relationships among the members in the community and reciprocity, or social interdependence (Gonzalez et al., 2005; Moll et al., 1992). Going into homes and talking with families to understand their literate lives, Moll generated the term funds of knowledge to describe the competencies and knowledge that community members that was built from their life experiences. Their work emphasizes the social aspect of literacy, or how “learning does not take place just ‘between the ears’ ” but within the larger contexts in which children live (Gonzalez et al., 2005, p. ix). The researchers and teachers on the research team found a richness in the homes that they then drew on to strengthen their classroom instruction.

With the work of Moll and his colleagues, there has been a resurgence of work on bilingual and multilingual families. More families are raising their children to speak, read, and write in other languages; they are seeking community resources such as after-school programs and weekend schools for their children to develop their bilingualism. Gregory, Long, and Volk (2004) used the field of anthropology as a vantage point in coining the term Syncretic Literacy Studies in the study of bilingual and multilingual households. In their work, they argue that children simultaneously use language to acquire membership into multiple groups as they practice cross-cultural and cross-linguistic practices. More specifically, they discuss learning through sibling, grandparent, and peer interactions. The growing body of research studies (e.g., Dantas & Manyak, 2010; Gregory & Williams, 2000; Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003) lay a foundation of work on how ethnographic perspectives highlight how families develop, maintain, and/or delineate their biracial identities, and subsequently, use their bilingualism and biliteracy as a way of adapting to or challenging language and cultural ideologies.

Adding to this body of research, the first section Everyday Families, Everyday Learning possesses two chapters that highlight the everyday processes that result in learning in the home. In Chapter 2, Kabuto discusses the insights gained about the distribution of knowledge and cultural resources through siblings’ spontaneous bilingual writing. Using a semiotic perspective to analyze the writing and drawing that resulted from sibling interactions, Kabuto illustrates how siblings can construct formats allowing each other “membership into linguistic and cultural domains that define their everyday lives” as siblings act as mediators in the family’s funds of knowledge.

In Chapter 3, Miller problematizes the concept of “racism” and how discourses that result from common, everyday participation in childhood activities perpetuate ideas of race and racism for young children. Through a qualitative, constant comparative approach to data analysis, Miller argues that through her parent–research, she was in a position “to acknowledge that racism affects our day-to-day lives in ways that are inescapable and, however unintentional, we teach White children how to be racist every day through normal socialization in White worlds.”

These studies suggest that naturalistic learning arises out of the “messiness of ordinary life” (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) and through authentic participation with others in cultural activities. As Miller in Chapter 3 suggests, sometimes what children learn is not always what we want them to learn, since children not only learn how to speak, read, and write, but they also acquire hidden ideologies attached to ways of speaking, reading, and writing. This point is critical for researchers and educators to acknowledge, because the type of naturalistic learning that evolves out of daily cultural, family practices can look very different from the ways learning is organized within schools.

Families and Schooling

The fact that children come to school from families and return to their respective families at the end of the day continues to be commonly neglected in educational settings. Discussions within education tend to address standards, recently the Common Core Standards, and assessments, specifically standardized testing as a measure of children’s yearly academic progress. Children in classrooms return home to families who engage them in everyday family processes. Within these processes, a variety of factors influence the functioning of families and, hence, how and what children learn. Daily emotions, such as stress, happiness, love, and tension, play important roles in maintaining the processes by which families engage with their members (Almeida, 2005; Almeida, Wethington, & Chandler, 1999; Perrez et al., 2005). The amount of stress that parents bring home from work may cause them to work less with their children at home (Almeida, 2005). The fact that parents are working odd hours may decrease the time they may spend with their children. Parental self-esteem and confidence in the area of their own educational abilities can affect how they interact and support their children in reading and writing in the home (Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler, 1997). At the same time, parents may project their own emotional experiences and beliefs of education onto their children. Parents raise their children within sets of inherited, unexamined traditions, beliefs, and practices that influence their ways of communicating through spoken language and writing (Daly, 2003).

In spite of the fact that researchers in the field of family studies continue to argue the need for more research on how emotions, family stories, religion, and the uses of time and space mediate family processes (e.g. Daly, 2003; Ronka & Korvela, 2009), the field of education is in danger of seeing families and children as rational and predictable. As Kathleen and Patrick Shannon write in Chapter 8, “The idea that kids are individuals is probably not news to many, although federal reading education policies try to standardize children. But how often do educators stop to acknowledge that parents are individuals as well, with unique readings of the literacies of their children?” In this sense, children become removed from the effects of family processes and, in the spirit of scientism, studied in isolation of the family, but in relation to other children whose families are different from the next.

There is, however, a large body of research in the field of education that counters the rationality and predictability of children. This body of research highlights the mismatches between home and school learning as incompatibility between cultural ways of learning and/or disparities between home and school practices and routines. While it is not at all possible to review all the studies here, there have been a few influential ones that continue to shape how researchers view the mismatch between home and school learning and the consequences of such misalliances.

Sociolinguist James Gee (1996) illustrated how “ ‘everyday’ stories very often make ‘deep sense’ in quite literary ways” (p. 103). His study of children who come from cultures with strong oral cultural pasts illustrates how these children were not “successful” in communicating during common classroom routines, such as sharing-ti...