Doctoral Dissertation Research: Mexican Immigrant Fathers and their Children: An Investigation of Communicative Resources across Contexts of Learning

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

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.