Fabienne Doucet

How African American Parents Understand Their and Teachers' Roles in Children's Schooling and What This Means for Preparing Preservice Teachers.

Preservice teachers are socialized by their own raced, classed, and gendered experiences to expect “caring parents” to behave and contribute in certain ways to their childrens schooling. Preservice teachers who come from widely divergent backgrounds from the communities in which they serve can sometimes be skeptical of parents who are not involved in childrens schooling in ways that are familiar from their own upbringing. Moreover, much of the existing scholarship on parent involvement and the transition to school takes a top-down approach that discounts the important knowledge parents bring to the table. This is a study of African American parents of young children who were preparing to transition to kindergarten or first grade that proposes an alternate conversation about what we can learn from parents when we examine their ways of framing and enacting “involvement” in their childrens school lives. African American parents and caregivers (N = 25) participated in qualitative interviews. Thematic analyses of the interviews revealed that participants constructed preparation for the transition to school broadly, as preparation for the “real world.” I will discuss the implications of the study for teaching, teacher education, and future research, so that preservice teachers and teacher educators can begin to build a greater imagination for parent involvement.

The transition to school: Reflections from a contextualist perspective

The first day of school arrives. Some of the children enter in tears, others with excited looks on their faces, and yet others come into the classroom with tentative steps, a mixture of holding on to someone’s hand and looking around to see whether there are friends to be made. For the teachers, too, the first day of the new school year can be a time of excitement, of challenge, or a feeling of ‘same old, same old’. Although the first day of school may not be a good predictor of children’s eventual success or failure, the transition to school itself is one of the most important changes that occur in the lives of young children. Children who make this transition smoothly may be on an easier road to success than those for whom the transition is more troublesome. In this chapter we therefore reflect on ways in which to help children and teachers negotiate this transition. The vast majority of the research that has been conducted on this topic focuses on the transition to school from the school’s perspective: what can be done to help children be prepared for school entry? Much of this research deals with issues of ‘school readiness’ or examines the nature and quality of children’s preschool experiences. Other researchers examine the steps that can be taken to encourage parents to understand and support the school’s goals, both before the children arrive in school and during the children’s first years in school. Our primary goal, however, is to explain how a contextualist perspective may help both children and their teachers make the transition go smoothly. We therefore first describe what we mean by contextualism and briefly discuss two major contextualist theories – those of Lev Vygotsky and Urie Bronfenbrenner – before discussing how this contextualist perspective can be incorporated into the classroom.

What should young Black children know about race? Parents of preschoolers, preparation for bias, and promoting egalitarianism

This qualitative study of 26 African American parents and caregivers of preschool children sought to address gaps in the current literature by exploring how the intersection of parents’ racism experiences and social class may play a role in race-related socialization during the early years. Analysis of narrative interviews revealed that egalitarianism surfaced as the most common content of racial socialization (ethnic-racial socialization) messages. We also found that preparation for bias emerged as qualitatively different for the working- and middle-class African Americans, however, and thus, we argue that the ways in which working- and middle-class African American parents of preschoolers made sense of their experiences with racism and discrimination were different and that this shaped their preparation for bias messages differently. To provide a contrast for illustrating this argument, we detail working- and middle-class participants’ use of egalitarianism messages in relationship to their stories about racism, proposing here that parents may have been attuning to their young children’s developmental stage when deciding which messages to promote.

What Does a Culturally Sustaining Learning Climate Look Like

A solid base of research evidence exists to show that teachers’ assessments of children are impacted by their perceptions of those children. From the Pygmalion in the Classroom experiment which powerfully showed that teacher expectations of students impacted those students’ performance, to more recent research on teachers’ underrating of children based on low SES, race, and language learner status, it is clear that what educators believe about their students has real implications for their educational outcomes. This article examines the learning climate for young children at the intersection of childrens immigration status, disproportionality, and teacher perceptions, making an argument for classrooms that are humanizing and culturally sustaining. Given the large and ever growing population of young immigrant students, teachers need tools to develop positive climates within which all students can thrive. This article presents a framework of such tools that can be built into teacher preparation curricula to support the development of early childhood educators.

RESEARCHING AND FACILITATING AFRICAN AMERICAN GLOBAL VOLUNTEERISM

There has been little theoretical or empirical study regarding the factors that promote or thwart international service among African American adults. A review of the extant research on international volunteerism highlights factors that may facilitate or inhibit international service among African Americans. Religion can play a role in promoting African American volunteerism generally, and international service specifically. Building on existing research and theory, a conceptual model can be sketched that accounts for the complex ways in which intrapersonal, interpersonal, contextual, sociopolitical, and religious factors inform international service among African Americans.