Latino eco-cul

Goldenberg, C. N. & Gallimore, R. (1995). Immigrant Latino parents' values and beliefs about their children's education: Continuities and discontinuities across cultures and generations. In P. Pintrich & M. Maehr (Eds.), Advances in Motivation and Achievement (Vol. 9, pp. 183-227). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Goldenberg & Gallimore, 1995.pdf

Reese, L., Balzano, S., Gallimore, R., & Goldenberg, C. (1995). The concept of Educación: Latino family values and American schooling. International Journal of Educational Research, 23, 1, 57-81. (Reprinted in J. Q. Adams & J. R. Welsch, Eds. (1999) Cultural Diversity: Curriculum, Classroom, and Climate. Illinois Staff and Curriculum Developers Association). Reese, Balzano, Gallimore & Goldenberg, 1995.pdf

When Latino parents use the term “educación”, they refer to the moral upbringing that they give the child, not just formal schooling. Most parents regard their major responsibility in the home to be teaching children the difference between right and wrong and fostering proper behavior as a foundation for academic learning (estudios). They talk of academic and moral education as inseparable and part of the same process. Thus, when they ask the teacher how their child is behaving in school, they view the child’s moral deportment as part of, not separated from, academic learning.

Gallimore, R. & Reese, L. J. (1999). Mexican immigrants in urban California: Forging adaptations from familiar and new cultural resources. In M. C. Foblets & C. L. Pang (Eds.), Culture, Ethnicity and Immigration. In honor of Prof. E. Roosens (pp. 245-263). Leuven, Belgium: ACCO. Gallimore & Reese. 1999.pdf

“The process of cultural change is inexorable” for the Mexicano immigrants to California to whom we have been listening and talking for more than a decade. Some changes were anticipated and even embraced: they uprooted themselves and their families in search of better jobs, living conditions, and educational opportunities for their children. However, they have much more mixed reactions about changing their socialization beliefs and practices. For these families immigration to the U.S. set in a motion something more than a simple linear model of acculturation defined as the extent to which they substituted their natal beliefs and practices for U.S. alternatives (Phinney, 1996, p. 921).

Rather than wholesale abandonment of their cultural traditions, or insistence on replicating home country practices on new soil, the goal for most families is forging adaptive and acceptable practices by incorporating the new into their familiar model of child rearing and socialization (Reese, Balzano, Gallimore, & Goldenberg, 1995). This model which parents refer to as ‘educación’ has its roots in agrarian environments. Its key features of family unity, interdependence of kin, and obedience and respect for elders evolved as adaptive values in contexts in which an entire family works together as an economic unit and where child labor is necessary for survival (LeVine & White, 1986). Although agrarian values evolved in rural economies, they retain value for immigrants given their precarious lives in urban settings. The agrarian model for newly-arrived immigrants to the U.S. is “ a continuous source of meaning and guidance” (LeVine and White, l986).

Parents are more satisfied with their children’s school performance when teachers make efforts to involve the family in the child’s learning, and the children do better than those whose teachers are not reported to make such efforts. Many immigrant parents view U.S. schools as less stringent than Mexican schools. They expect homework and try to assist with homework to the extent that their level of schooling and English language proficiency permit. They are disappointed when they believe their child is not being held to a high academic and moral standard.

Parents are often not aware of how well their child is actually doing in school. Some do not fully understand the report cards they are provided and many rely on homework or observations of the child’s interest and engagement in homework tasks to make judgments about academic progress. For example, parents express doubts about the meaning of such terms as “satisfactory.” One father explained the grade point average as “points that go up to 3000,” perhaps reflecting the use in Latin America of the convention that 3.000 is equivalent to 3,000 in U.S. notation. On the whole, parents of lower achievers tend to rate their children’s performance much higher than the teachers. They interpret their child is doing well if he always wants to go to school or he always does his homework.

Teachers can make a difference in student achievement. In our Latino Home-School study, we observed first hand the effects of teachers’ sending regular homework, requiring reading aloud as part of daily homework, and contacting parents to involve them in the learning process. Teachers who did these things were highly praised by parents, and the students of teachers had higher standardized reading scores in both Spanish and English. In a related project in one of the participating elementary schools, project investigators worked with teachers and administrators on setting grade level expectations and working together to establish locally meaningful indicators of achievement. Grade-level meetings were used by teachers to study and implement better lessons based on the expectations and indicators. This process, which took place over a period of several years, resulted in marked gains in the reading and writing proficiency of students similar to those in our longitudinal sample.

Reese, L., Goldenberg, C. N., Loucky, J., & Gallimore, R. (1995). Ecocultural context, cultural activity, and emergent literacy of Spanish-speaking children. In S.W. Rothstein (Ed.), Class, Culture and Race in American Schools: A Handbook (pp. 199-224). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Reese, L., Gallimore, R., & Goldenberg, C. (1999). Job-required literacy, home literacy environments, and school reading: Early literacy experiences of immigrant Latino children. In J. G. Lipson & L. A. McSpadden (Eds.), Negotiating Power and Place at the Margins: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Vol. VII, (pp. 232–269). Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association.

Literate parents are likely to "carry into" children's everyday routines two kinds of early literacy influences. First, whatever skills the job requires may directly or indirectly affect the kinds of experiences children have at home; for example, parents who read or prepare even simple documents on the job may generalize their skills to joint literacy activities with children at home. Second, it is likely that parents who use literacy as a subsistence tool will recognize its adaptive value, and therefore attend more systematically to their children's literacy development and experiences at home and school. Each of these is an example of "unpacking" group-level factors to identify the ecological/cultural sources of the specific processes through which children's development is affected (Weisner 1984).

We argue that ecocultural influences, including but not limited to the parents' job and job-related uses of literacy, shape and constrain families' daily routines, which in turn create the settings for children to learn developmentally significant functions. Specifically, we are interested in the development of literacy skills before and during the children's kindergarten school year.

In a study of 121 Latino children, job-required father literacy was the only eco-cultural feature which correlated significantly with child test scores [r = .20, p < .05]. None of the following was significantly associated with test scores: parent education, occupational status, years living in the U.S., and family's use of religious texts.

In addition, job-required father literacy was significantly correlated with several other eco-cultural and home environment variables (see Table 1 for values). These significant correlates included two eco-cultural variables: father's job status and job-required literacy for the mother.

Job-required father literacy was also significantly associated with selected beliefs and aspirations for children. Fathers required to use literacy at work are from families which have higher hopes for their children's job status as adults, and they hold higher educational expectations. In addition, those same fathers are from families which expressed the belief that it is important to help children with homework and to review the schoolwork that children have done. These results suggest a relationship between father's work or subsistence activities and the home literacy environment.

However, there was no significant correlation of job-required father literacy with reported help provided the child at home. In other words, there is no evidence that subsistence-based use of literacy by father is transported to the home to affect the daily experiences of the child, at least in the activities which formed part of the interview protocol (i.e. reading to children, assisting with homework, teaching letters and words).

It should be noted that one limitation of the results reported above is that the origin of reports was, in 76% of the cases, the mother alone. Not only was the mother reporting on her perception of what the "family" did to assist children at home and what "parent" values were regarding education, she was also the source for whether fathers were required to use literacy at work. Bearing in mind this caveat, we see that the father's use of literacy in the workplace (as reported by either mother or father) emerges as a critical factor in predicting children's literacy performance at school. This finding is in line with ecocultural theory which predicts that parents' subsistence tools such as job-required literacy will have an influence on children's activities in the home environment. However, the data provide no clear indication of the manner or process through which that influence occurs. Thus we are left with two questions: (1) how does the father's workplace use of literacy make itself manifest in the home activity settings which mold children's literacy experiences, and (2) what is the roadway of indirect influences or effects of the father's workplace literacy on the home environment which ultimately play themselves out in the family's literacy activities?

To answer these questions, we relied on qualitative data from Study 2, with the case materials collected from a subset of 32 families drawn from the longitudinal survey of Study 1, and from Study 3, with observational data on ten families drawn from the same area.

In summary, the statistical finding that job-required literacy of the fathers is related to children's literacy scores is reflected in some of the cases in ways that seem consistent with eco-cultural and activity setting theory. However, we have no clear explanation for the absence of significant correlations of test scores to mother variables such as education and job-related literacy. In fact, the case materials from Study 2 would suggest these ought to have appeared. It is possible that mothers' job-related literacy is not correlated with child outcomes because of the fact that the majority of the mothers do not work outside of the home. It is also reported by families that mothers are the ones who spend more time engaged in supervising schoolwork and assisting children with homework tasks. In some cases, when the child is experiencing difficulties in school, mothers redouble their efforts to assist the child. It is likely, therefore, that mothers' literacy use and activities are important in children's lives but not related to literacy performance in school in a simple or linear way, with more activity being associated with higher performance. Finally, the analyses in Study 1 suggested that it was not the use of literacy on the job by fathers per se that impacted children's literacy development, but rather it was the way in which job-related literacy impacted the home literacy environments where children's development was being fostered that made a difference. Mothers, clearly, are contributing to the home literacy environment in general as well as engaging their children in various types of literacy activities. Their contributions are not reflected in simple correlations with level of education or work status.

It is not yet clear what the "pathway" or "pathways" are through which father's work literacy impacts child literacy development. The statistical data suggest that they might include monitoring homework and schoolwork. The case data presented above suggest, however, that another pathway of influence of father's job-related literacy on home literacy activities may be a more indirect one, with the father orchestrating family members' interactions with the child, providing additional literacy materials to support academic progress, and modeling literate behavior as he completes job tasks or his own night school homework.