Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers with Special Focus on Immigrant Latino Families

by Trumbull, Elise; Rothstein-Fisch, Carrie; Greenfield, Patricia M.; Quiroz, Blanca

• ISBN13: 9780805835199
• ISBN10: 0805835199
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Lawrence Erlbau

Summary

Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers is intended to stimulate broad thinking about how to meet the challenges of education in a pluralistic society. It is a powerful resource for in-service and preservice multicultural education and professional development. The Guide presents a framework for understanding differences and conflicts that arise in situations where school culture is more individualistic than the value system of the home. It shares what researchers and teachers of the Bridging Cultures Project have learned from the experimentation of teacher-researchers in their own classrooms of largely immigrant Latino students and explores other research on promoting improved home-school relationships across cultures. The framework leads to specific suggestions for supporting teachers to cross-cultural communication; organization parent-teacher conferences that work; use strategies that increase parent involvement in schooling; increase their skills as researchers; and employ ethnographic techniques to learn about home cultures. Although the research underlying the Bridging Cultures Project and this Guide focuses on immigrant Latino families, since this is the primary population with which the framework was originally used, it is a potent tool for learning about other cultures as well because many face similar discrepancies between their own more collectivistic approaches to childrearing and schooling and the more individualistic approach of the dominant culture.

Author Biography

Elise Trumbull, Ed.D. Culture and Language in Education Program WestEd San Francisco, California Carrie Rothstein-Fisch, Ph.D. Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling College of Education California State University, Northridge, California Patricia M. Greenfield, Ph.D. Department of Psychology University of California, Los Angeles, California Blanca Quiroz, M.A. Department of Psychology and Latin American Studies Program University of California, Los Angeles, California (now a doctoral candidate, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Table of Contents

Preface	xiii
Responding to the Increase in Classroom Diversity	xiii
Introducing a Framework for Understanding Culture	xv
A Truly Useful Theoretical Framework	xvi
The Bridging Cultures Project	xvii
Organization of the Guide	xix
A Few Words about Terminology	xx
Acknowledgments	xxi
The Bridging Cultures Framework	1	(28)
But First, What Is Culture?	1	(1)
The Power of the Bridging Cultures Framework	2	(1)
Limitations of a Single Model for Child Development	2	(1)
The Dynamic Nature of Culture	3	(1)
Individualism and Collectivism	4	(5)
Further Contrasts between Individualism and Collectivism	9	(4)
Different Orientations, Different Outcomes	13	(1)
Individualism and Collectivism in Collision	14	(7)
Relationship to Other Frameworks for Understanding Cultures	21	(2)
Strands of Multicultural Education	23	(3)
Conclusion	26	(3)
Parent Involvement: Recommended But Not Always Successful	29	(26)
``Minority'' Parent Involvement	32	(1)
Parent-School Partnerships: Responsibilities of Parents and Schools	33	(10)
Factors Influencing Parent Participation	43	(4)
Questioning Assumptions	47	(1)
Looking beyond Demographics to Interpersonal Processes	48	(4)
Finding Common Ground between Home and School	52	(3)
The Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conference	55	(20)
What Is a Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conference?	56	(1)
The Tradition of Parent-Teacher Conferences	57	(1)
Research on Cross-Cultural Parent-Teacher Conferences	58	(1)
Culture and Communication in the Parent-Teacher Conference	59	(4)
Using Cultural Knowledge to Enhance Communication	63	(3)
Improving Parent-Teacher Conferences	66	(6)
Putting the Parent-Teacher Conference in Proper Perspective	72	(3)
Learning What Works	75	(16)
Understanding Parents' Points of View	78	(2)
Evaluating the Messages That Schools Send	80	(1)
Being More Conscious of the Messages Sent	81	(1)
Developing Closer Personal Relationships with Families	81	(2)
Extending Opportunities for Parent-Teacher Interaction	83	(4)
Promoting Bicultural Proficiency	87	(4)
Teachers as Researchers	91	(36)
Action Research	92	(2)
Inquiry and Reflection: Two Intertwined Elements in Action Research	94	(2)
Teachers as Researchers in the Bridging Cultures Project	96	(1)
Collaborative Action Research	97	(6)
Ethnographic Inquiry	103	(10)
Teacher Research as Professional Development	113	(5)
How Successful Has Collaborative Action Research Been in the Bridging Cultures Project?	118	(4)
A Hope and a Touch of Reality	122	(5)
Conclusion: The Challenge of Coming Together	127	(10)
The Need for Cultural Knowledge	128	(2)
Update: What's Happening Now?	130	(1)
How Does Bridging Cultures Fit into the Big Picture of School Reform?	130	(2)
What's to Be Gained?	132	(5)
APPENDIX THE BRIDGING CULTURES PROJECT IN BRIEF	137	(8)
Background and Purpose	137	(1)
The People	138	(1)
Procedures	138	(3)
Workshop Outcomes	141	(1)
Changes in Teachers' Roles	142	(1)
Documenting Teacher Change	143	(1)
Powerful Examples Make the Framework Come Alive	144	(1)
References	145	(14)
Author Index	159	(8)
Subject Index	167