University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Sarah Lipinoga, supervised by Dr. Betsy Rymes, will undertake rsearch on the processes of negotiation across home and school contexts and the ways that these negotiations unfold within families. The researcher will focus on Mexican immigrant fathers' and children's daily interactions to investigate whether or not fathers' participation changes or is changed by their children's negotiations of home and school worlds. The children of immigrants often describe living between "two worlds," with schools serving as particularly important spaces for learning new values and behaviors. Mexican immigrant men are often stereotyped as uninvolved in their children's lives, and, consequently, their participation in home and school spaces is both under-researched by social scientists and sometiems overlooked by schools. The purpose of this research is to investigate if previously overlooked interactions between immigrant fathers and their children constitute educational experiences, how these forms of interaction travel across institutional contexts over time to take on new meanings and create one world out of two, and the effects this has on schooling and immigrant families.
The research will be carried out in a recently established Mexican-immigrant community in Pennsylvania, a heightened contact zone in which new immigrants and established local populations are negotiating shared experiences for the first time. The researcher will employ a combination of ethnographic methods (participant observation, interviewing, and document collection) and discourse analytic methods (analysis of videotaped naturally occurring interactions and playback sessions) to examine data collected across home and school contexts over the course of a year.
Tracking the movement of language and semiotic resources for six families can reveal more nuanced understandings of both the separateness and porosity of cultural fields, provide a precise account of processes of incorporation over one year, and determine if the power dynamics of these negotiations unfold differently for different categories of people. Findings may inform curricula that build upon home-based interactions as well as policy that better understands immigrant fathers' participation in order to foster student achievement. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
Situated in a recently established Mexican-immigrant community in Pennsylvania, this project investigated naturally occurring interactions in homes and school to reveal how Mexican immigrant fathers’ participation shapes and is shaped by their children’s schooling. The purpose of this research was to use ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to investigate how previously overlooked interactions between immigrant fathers and their children constitute educational experiences, how these forms of interaction travel across institutional contexts over time to take on new meanings, and the effects this has on schooling and immigrant families. This research has important intellectual merit because it provides nuanced empirical illustrations of family life and learning for Mexican immigrant families during a period of strong anti-immigrant sentiment. Findings point to a wide variety of gender roles and responsibilities in Mexican immigrant families, which often differ from stereotypical depictions of fathers as the primary wage earners and mothers as the primary caregivers. In addition, this project illustrates how immigration policies are racializing and highly gendered in practice, as they overwhelmingly target Mexican immigrant men. These data provide empirical examples that illustrate the complexities of how immigration practices shape relationships, childhoods, and schooling in immigrant families. They also suggest that although immigration deportation practices focus on Mexican adult males, their repercussions shape immigrant childhoods in powerful ways, such as separating families and positioning children as mediators between the police and their parents. The findings from this research also have broader educational impacts. In contrast to Mexican immigrant fathers’ hyper-visibility to immigration police, these same fathers are often invisible within the schooling context, even when they are engaging in typical parent involvement practices and physically present in schools. For example, fathers are rarely mentioned by educators during in-school learning and educators tend to address Mexican immigrant mothers rather than fathers during interactions when both are present. In addition, the wide range of communicative resources that children learned from their fathers were rarely recognized or built upon within the schooling context. Findings from this project suggest that in an educational climate that eagerly seeks to promote parent involvement, educators are missing important opportunities to build upon Mexican immigrant fathers’ involvement in their children’s schooling by overlooking their contributions.
