Parents as "Help Labor": Inner-City Teachers' Narratives of Parent Involvement.

Abstract

Introduction This article examines teachers' perceptions of parent involvement through the narratives of 15 racially and linguistically diverse teachers who worked together at Jefferson Elementary, (1) an inner-city school in Northern California composed mostly of African-American, Latino, and Asian students. One overarching research question framed the qualitative study: How do teachers at an inner-city elementary school perceive parents and parental involvement? Analyzing teachers' constructions of parental involvement allows for a deeper understanding of how teachers in under-resourced inner-city schools seek to utilize parents, as well as what kinds of activities teachers emphasize that may be different from well-documented parent involvement or volunteer practices of middle class school communities. Understanding teachers' perspectives of their working relationships with parents at under-resourced inner-city schools can also help illuminate potential collaborations as well as possible tensions between teachers and working class parents. What is more, given that credential programs throughout the country require that teacher candidates understand how to involve minority families in schools (e.g., California's SB 2042, CLAD), the present study may help teacher educators and their students explore how particular parent involvement models inform teacher-parent relationships, involvement practices, and interactional patterns, particularly for those who work in urban settings. If future teachers are to involve parents in meaningful ways, they must come to understand how the perceptions and practices of parent involvement are mediated by both the reality of parents' lives and the constraints of particular school contexts. Before moving on to the findings, I ground this discussion in a brief review of parent involvement research. Specifically, I discuss the research that explores involvement of minority and low-income families in schools, as well as the literature on school partnerships and school empowerment models. Following the literature review, I detail the methods used to collect the interview data. The findings illustrate how the teachers employed neither partnership nor empowerment models, but instead, used parent labor to accomplish their teaching work. Finally, I discuss the implications for teacher education. Literature Review Parent involvement in poor inner-city schools educating minority youth is relatively lower and of a different quality than it is in White middle class schools, a fact that has received much attention in the academic literature (Auerbach, 2007; Lareau, 1989; Lareau, 2003). Research explaining why working class minority parents are not as involved as their middle-class White counterparts has moved beyond the cultural deficit arguments promulgated by Coleman (1966) and Moynihan (1969), which blamed minority family cultures, claiming that these parents cared little about the formal education of their children. Deficit approaches have been challenged over the last 40 years by pointing out that Eurocentric cultural interpretations of families have been privileged in the research literature on parental involvement (see Ascher, 1994; Auerbach, 1995; Biddle, 2001; De Gaetano, 2007; Delgado-Gaitan, 1992; Lightfoot, 1978; Ramirez, 2000; Scott-Jones, 1995; Yosso 2005). More contemporary and culturally relevant arguments focus on why and how poor minority parents, in some cases, may come to feel isolated, ignored, and unwelcomed in schools (Bempechat, 1992; Cooper & Christie, 2005; Lawson, 2003; Rich, 1987; Trotman, 2001). Additionally, studies demonstrate that long work hours, the holding of multiple jobs, and other familial responsibilities conflict with the hours that urban schools make available for parent involvement (Coots, 1998; Lareau, 1987; 1994; Pena, 2000; Smalley & Reyes-Blanes, 2001; Waanders, Mendez, & Downer, 2007). Furthermore, local barriers in poor inner city communities, such as issues of community safety and availability of transportation and childcare, continue to pose challenges to parent involvement (Drummond & Stipek, 2004). …

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