Leveraging Transitive Relations for Crowdsourced Joins

Language Arts, Volume 90 Number 1, September 2012

“Una de mis preguntas es, y que siempre me la he hecho, quisiera saber si reciben los maestros o los futuros maestros una capacitación en la universidad tocante a cómo relacionarse con los padres de familia . . . . Quizá el personal de la escuela no sabe cómo tratar a los padres de familia. Y por qué? Porque a veces, pues, son de origen mexicano. Cuando llegan a las escuelas y nomás ven como que los padres vienen a molestarlos o a quitarles el tiempo. Así lo toman ellos. Y en base de esas malas experiencias deciden mejor ya no intentar el acercamiento a los maestros.”

[One of my questions is, and it’s something I’ve always wondered about, I would like to know if teachers or future teachers are taught at the university about how to work with parents . . . . Maybe the staff at school don’t know how to work with parents. And why? Because sometimes, well, they’re Mexican. When they come to the schools and the teachers see them, it’s like the parents are coming to bother them or waste their time. That’s their attitude. And based on those bad experienc-es, they (the parents) decide it’s better not to approach the teachers.]

—“Elizabeth,” mother of five bilingual children

Literacy research with Bilingual Families as Teaching against the TidesMy purpose in writing this article is to share the views of bilingual parents about their children’s education. Making parents’ views better known supports the work of language arts educators who believe that bilingual families can contribute to children’s literacy development. I also hope to encourage and guide teachers who would like to use bilingual family literacies as resources for teaching and learning. The views held by bilingual families serve as important counter-stories to powerful defi-cit theories about bilingual children that many have experienced and witnessed in schools (Flores, 2005;

Meyer, 2009). These views are especially powerful in communities near the US–Mexico border and other regions where teachers have been raised in bilingual households.

For several years, I have been documenting the literacies of bilingual children in the Rio Grande Valley in southeast Texas. Although I have spent many hours observing reading and writing in class-rooms, I am increasingly drawn to exploring what children and families do with written language in their homes and communities. To some readers, this might seem an odd focus. After all, language arts teachers are expected to know a great deal about classroom literacies, and teacher preparation pro-grams are required to help future educators succeed on certification exams where classroom literacies are strongly emphasized. Given these expectations, studies about out-of-school literacies of bilingual families could seem irrelevant and unproductive. So why should language arts educators learn about the literacies of bilingual families?

First and most important, dominant forms of literacy instruction are clearly not helping children from bilingual backgrounds become strong readers and writers. There is considerable research suggest-ing that bilingual children, including those living on the border, are being educationally handicapped by the combination of English-only instruction, emphasis on reading for sound at the expense of meaning, and high-stakes testing that is the norm in many schools (Escamilla, 2006; McNeil, Coppola, Radigan, & Vasquez Heilig, 2008; Meyer, 2002; Mitchell, 2005; Valenzuela, 2005). For students liv-ing in poverty and/or with parents with limited for-mal education, this combination is especially dev-astating (Meyer, 2009).

Luz A. Murillo

Learning from Bilingual Family Literacies

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Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

Luz A. Murillo | Learning from Bilingual Family Literacies


Second, funds of knowledge approaches (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) to literacy instruction, in which teachers scaffold instruction from knowledge children have developed at home, have much to offer bilingual learners. In each community, parents and families hold specialized knowledge, such as how to operate a family busi-ness, play musical instruments, design and make clothing, or repair machinery, that educators can learn from (Compton-Lilly, 2007; Reyes, 2010). To recover this knowledge and make it available to teachers, I frame my research as “teaching against the tides” of widespread ignorance about and disre-spect for bilingual parents and families.

Finally, immigrant parents’ voices are seldom heard in schools (Hernandez-Zamora, 2010). In Texas and other states, poor communities are being asked to pay for a greater proportion of education costs (Texas Legislative Study Group, 2011). At the same time, approximately half of Mexican-origin children living on the border leave school before graduating from high school (Deviney, 2011). Many immigrant parents cannot vote in federal, state, or local elections because they are not US cit-izens. Listening carefully to parents is one way that language arts teachers can begin to create bridges “across which children’s talents beyond subject matter achievement can be recognized and used” (Heath, 2011, p. 149).

Borderlands as Context for Literacy Practices and LearningThe bilingual families whose literacy practices I describe here live and work in the lower Rio Grande Valley (RGV), specifically the border communities that comprise Cameron and Hidalgo counties. “The Valley,” as it is known locally, occupies the eastern-most section of the US–Mexico border, as on the map shown in Figure 1.

The RGV is one of the most bilingual regions in the US. Mexican-origin residents make up 90 percent or more of the population (Maril, 1989). Nearly 80 percent of residents speak Spanish at home, and most report they speak English well or very well (US Census, 2000). Despite impressive

levels of community bilingualism, Spanish is some-times unwelcome in local schools (Díaz, 2011); even in bilingual programs, teachers and future teachers report feeling ashamed or insecure about their Spanish proficiency (Murillo, 2010).

Although school districts receive federal and state funds for bilingual students, many elementary school learners in Texas receive instruction aimed at English monolingualism rather than biliteracy or the development of aca-demic skills in two lan-guages. Spanish is offered as an academic subject in high school and col-lege, where it is treated essentially as a foreign language. A preservice teacher noted the irony of this situation, observing, “We are scolded in ele-mentary school for speak-ing Spanish, and then in high school we are scolded because we do not know how to read, write, and speak it.” These paradoxes reflect the long history of discrimination against Spanish speakers in the region (Anzaldúa, 1987; Guerra, 2007; Richardson, 1999) and characterize contemporary schooling of Mexican-origin students in Valley schools.

The RGV has been described as one of the poorest regions in the country (Deviney, 2011; Trueba, 2004). An agricultural region long isolated

Figure 1. Map of Rio Grande Valley

Listening carefully to parents

is one way that language

arts teachers can begin to

create bridges “across which

children’s talents beyond

subject matter achievement

can be recognized and used.”



from the economic centers of the US and Mexico, the population grew quickly in the 1990s follow-ing the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent increase in the number of maquiladoras (factories that produce compo-nents of electronics, clothing, and other products that are then assembled and sold internationally) on the Mexican side of the river. Despite visible symbols of growth, such as school construction and the appearance of national retail chain stores and fast-food restaurants, the profits from this eco-nomic development have been channeled to eco-nomic centers outside the region (Richardson & Resendiz, 2006). Ironically, while school dropout rates approach 50 percent (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2009; Deviney, 2011), teaching remains among the most desirable careers in the region.

Most recently, extreme violence in Mexico, fueled by US consumption of illegal drugs and carried out with weapons smuggled from the US (Nuñez & Klamminger, 2010), has pushed large numbers of Mexican nationals across the border. Some recent immigrants are economic elites who

send their children to pri-vate religious (often bilin-gual) schools in the US, but most cannot afford private education. Some lack the legal documents needed to rent a home or apartment and to obtain a driver’s license, bank account, or other form of identification. Despite the economic growth of the

Valley over the past two decades, many residents are undocumented, unemployed or underpaid, and suf-fer limited access to health and educational services (Mier et al., 2008; Richardson & Resendiz, 2006).

Bilingual Parents Talk about SchoolGathering data

To learn what bilingual parents think about schools and about their children’s education, I practiced what Gutiérrez, Arshad, & Henríquez (2009) call

“linguistic bricolage” (p. 362). In other words, I tried to capture the widest possible range of lit-eracies practiced by bilingual families. To do this, I gathered several types of data, including obser-vations of groups, family and community events, and in-depth interviews with participating parents and families. Because of the strong connections between literacy attainment and socioeconomic resources (Kennedy, 2010), I sought to include par-ticipants from different social classes, rather than a representative sample of RGV parents.

My friendships with participating parents often began with the preservice and practicing bilingual and language arts teachers I teach at a local univer-sity on the border. My students introduced me to their own families, fellow teachers, and members of their churches and other social networks. At the parents’ request, and because the majority of par-ents who allowed me into their homes are not (yet) fluent in English, I conducted parent workshops in which we shared Spanish/English bilingual books and techniques for reading with bilingual children. We read culturally relevant literature and books by local authors, such as Friends from the Other Side (Anzaldúa, 1993) and Lucha Libre (Garza, 2005), among others.

Another source of information about parents’ views about schools was Apasionados por la Lec-tura [Passionate about Reading], a local parent group formed to support Spanish literacy. After inviting me to present workshops on biliteracy development, the group returned the favor by coming to the uni-versity to speak with preservice teachers. Their pre-sentations were in the form of testimonios (Saave-dra, 2011)—powerful expressions of each parent’s personal experiences with schools and beliefs about how teachers and schools should work with immi-grant children. As a native speaker of Spanish from Colombia, I studied school and community literacies in Mexico (Smith, Murillo, & Jiménez, 2009) before working on the border. These experiences helped me develop strong rapport with parents. Several partici-pants commented that they felt comfortable discuss-ing their lives and thoughts with me because they knew I had lived in Mexico and spent time in schools like those they were familiar with.

As a native speaker of Spanish

from Colombia, I studied school

and community literacies in

Mexico before working on

the border. These experiences

helped me develop strong

rapport with parents.



Through these experiences, we developed a sense of mutual confianza [trust] that made it pos-sible for me to interview participating parents in their homes, often with children and other family members present. I was also invited to observe in the churches they attend and to participate in family events, such as the posada described below. Over the course of one school year, I interviewed parents in ten households and made numerous informal home visits to observe firsthand the literacy prac-tices parents described during our interviews. By spending time with families at different times of the day and year, I gained a deeper understanding of the role of literacy in their daily lives (Nabi, Rog-ers, & Street, 2009). Parents graciously allowed me to telephone or text them with follow-up questions, and in this way I learned of their expertise with dig-ital technologies. I made formal and informal visits to confirm and disconfirm my tentative conclusions, and to ask new questions as they emerged from my reading and rereading of field notes I had taken in previous visits.

Analysis

To analyze the data, I used the constant comparative method because it is useful for examining data from multiple sources (Patton, 1990). This involved iden-tifying initial patterns in what participants told me and in the literacy practices and artifacts I observed them using, and then expanding and revising these categories as I collected new examples and identi-fied counter-examples. I then reviewed new data in light of the emerging categories and checked with participants to ensure the “goodness of fit” of these new categories. Throughout the study, I considered what I was hearing and seeing from the theoreti-cal framework of subaltern knowledge (Anzaldúa, 2007; Mignolo, 2000). Specifically, this meant asking what we can learn about literacy by treat-ing bilingual and immigrant families as legitimate holders of knowledge (Braidotti, 2011).

In the following section, I present examples to illustrate three themes that language arts educators who work with Mexican immigrant students should be aware of: 1) family support for literacy devel-opment at home; 2) support for children’s literacy

development through the use of Spanish at home; and 3) parents’ agency in children’s education.

Family Support for Literacy development at homeBy listening to parents, my students and I learned about the rich literacy environments bilingual chil-dren are growing up with in the RGV. I ask my graduate and undergraduate students to work with a bilingual child each semester in order to document and learn from the literacy practices in local schools, homes, and communities (Gregory, Long, & Volk, 2004; Owocki & Goodman, 2002). For example, Laura (all names are pseudonyms), a fourth-grade classroom teacher who is earning a master’s degree in reading, shared stories about the read-ing abilities of Chanel, who had been labeled “at risk” by virtue of her fam-ily’s income level and the fact that Spanish was the primary language they all spoke at home. Laura chose to conduct her case study with Chanel because she initially viewed her as a typical “at risk” student. However, in her first report on the case study, Laura wrote:

I was amazed at the amount of literacy Chanel was exposed to before she entered my classroom. When I spoke to her grandmother, she informed me of how Chanel had been introduced to books at an early age when her step-grandfather would read stories to her. He would take Chanel and her brother to the public library and check books out. Her grandmother would also tell her cuentos [stories] about her family, read Bible stories and any other book Chanel desired.

In addition to the intergenerational support for book and story literacy provided by Chanel’s grandpar-ents, Laura wrote about learning how Chanel’s mother successfully helped her daughter with math homework, even as she used methods unfamiliar to Laura. She also marveled at the extensive calendar system Chanel’s mother used to keep track of fam-ily events and important tasks:

I was also astonished when I heard how her mother used an intricate system to manage household tasks.

Through these experiences,

we developed a sense of

mutual confianza [trust] that

made it possible for me to

interview participating parents

in their homes.



She kept appointments for every member of the family on a wall calendar and color-coded each using different colors for the members in the family. She also keeps a memorandum (notebook) in her purse, as well as set-ting a reminder on her phone.

At Laura’s suggestion, I interviewed Chanel’s mother, Luz, at the family home. She described her-self as “an organized person who has to write every-thing down” and told me about her educational his-tory in Mexico, which included leaving school at the end of ninth grade in order to work. Luz shared further details of the literacy and numeracy prac-tices she engages in as the “manager” in the house-hold. She explained that she uses four different colors on the household calendar, each reflecting a different type of activity or member of the house-hold. She uses a blue marker for activities involving her husband and son, orange for herself, pink for her two daughters, and green for dates that involve payments and bills. A sample page of Luz’s calen-dar is shown in Figure 2.

Our conversation and a tour of the home con-firmed Laura’s observation that the calendar system is just one of the many literacy examples found in this bilingual household. In addition to using mul-tiple intertextual supports for recording and remem-bering important dates, Luz commented that she employs different forms of literacy for different purposes. For example, she maintains a system of

manila envelopes in which she stores household bills, car records, and payment receipts; a separate system of folders contains the health records of each member of the family. Because some mem-bers of the family have had severe health problems and require multiple medications, Luz has learned to write down the ingredients of medicines rather than just the brand names. This allows her to check records at the pharmacy where she purchases medi-cation, and also to buy generic brands as a matter of family economy. Luz said that she keeps these kinds of records by hand, but she also recently learned to write and send text messages on her cell phone to communicate with her sister-in-law living in Mexico because it is cheaper than calling internationally.

These diverse examples of household literacies within a single home illustrate the critical impor-tance of reading and writing in the daily lives of bilingual families living on the border. Without knowledge of such examples, it is all too easy for teachers to “underestimate” the literacies of Span-ish-speaking families based on a common deficit view that “Mexicans don’t read or write.” Keep in mind that Laura, Chanel’s teacher, is herself Mexi-can American and was born and raised in the RGV. In her frank words, “I had the misconception that, because they mainly spoke Spanish in the house-hold, they really didn’t do much reading, writing, or math.” Clearly, becoming familiar with the forms of literacy that are present in children’s home lives pro-vides language arts teachers with a more complete picture of how Spanish-speaking immigrant parents do use literacy, as well as how these practices are supporting their children’s literacy development.

Furthermore, these examples are consistent with research demonstrating that literacy develop-ment starts for children before they come to school (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979; Tolchinsky, 2003). They can help teachers challenge common miscon-ceptions about legitimate forms of literacy taking place only in the school setting (Barton, 2007) and recognize that children are literacy apprentices in their families (Gregory, Long, & Volk, 2004). By exploring these literacy practices directly, teachers can learn that they are meaningful and have mater-ial consequences for their users.Figure 2. Luz’s calendar



Over the course of our interview and informal conversations, Lupita and Juan Carlos came to real-ize the remarkable amount of literacy in their home that they had previously taken for granted. Toward the end of a lengthy conversation in which they identified their family’s numerous forms of reading and writing in Spanish at home, they invited me to join them at a posada navideña, a Christmas party they were planning for families in their congrega-tion. At the posada, participants sang the traditional song “Pidiendo Posada” [asking for shelter] as they enacted the role of Joseph and Mary seeking shelter in Bethlehem before the birth of Jesus, while others played the parts of innkeepers denying them shel-ter. Although this was the first time Lupita and Juan Carlos had hosted a posada in the United States, many of the guests were familiar with the song from celebrations in Mexico, and the family pro-vided written copies of the lyrics in English and in Spanish. (For an example of what a typical posada looks and sounds like, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qzEsB_hIZ0.)

Later in the posada, after the piñata but before the tamales y chocolate, participants engaged in indi-vidual and group prayers, some of which involved recitation of lengthy oral texts from memory. Chil-dren were directly involved in all of these activities, including one literacy event structured exclusively for children in which Lupita asked them to write a letter to El Niño Dios [Baby Jesus] asking for health, family unity, and presents, as shown in Figure 3.

Support for Children’s Literacy development through home use of SpanishA second theme that emerged during conversations and visits with bilingual families is parents’ support for children’s literacy development through the use of Spanish at home. In contrast to the stereotype of uninvolved parenting that many teachers in the RGV have about immigrant parents, Lupita and Juan Car-los are highly engaged in their two children’s edu-cation. Both parents have seen how other children in their extended families have stopped speaking Spanish as a result of English-only instruction and sometimes under pressure from their own families.

Juan Carlos recounted the experiences of nieces and nephews whose parents forbid them to speak Spanish at home, in the belief that this would lead them to speak, read, and write English more quickly. He compared this pressure to the way Spanish and Spanish-speaking children are treated in many schools, and contrasted his own family’s efforts to maintain Spanish and develop bilingual-ism and biliteracy:

“Tratan de erradicar totalmente lo que es la cultura, y el habla del español. Entonces, nosotros sí siempre hemos tenido muy claro eso de que no queremos que los niños hablen solamente el inglés y borrarles la cultura, la tradición y la lengua materna.”

[They try to totally eradicate the culture and practice of speaking Spanish. So we have always clearly under-stood that we don’t want our kids to speak only English, or to erase their culture, traditions, and their mother tongue.]

For this reason, Juan Carlos and Lupita make every effort to speak, read, and write Spanish at home and to support the Spanish literacies their children are developing in the dual-language pro-gram they attend. Lupita and Juan Carlos are Span-ish-dominant professionals with degrees in jour-nalism from a Mexican university. Their advanced computer literacies have allowed them to research on the Internet and in books about the advantages of being bilingual and biliterate, and they have become convinced that the better their children learn to read and write in Spanish, the better they will eventually do in English.

Figure 3. Children write letters to El Niño Dios at Christmas.



el grado y que se frustrara y perdiera interés en la escuela.” [I was worried that she would have to repeat the year and that she’d get frustrated and lose interest in school.]

As it turned out, Nancy was right to be con-cerned. Her daughter, who had been an honor roll student in first grade, began getting D’s and F’s. When Nancy tried to help with homework, she noticed that her daughter was not only having dif-ficulty learning to read and write in English, she was also forgetting the Spanish literacy she had been developing. Nancy consulted with the teacher about her daughter’s failing grades many times, but near the end of the school year the teacher told her, “Señora, yo le recomiendo que repita el año.” [Señora, I recommend that your daughter repeat the year.] Nancy was devastated by this news. She told us, “Me sentí culpable, me siento culpable. Pero le dije ‘Maestra, ok, mi hija no va a repetir año, yo la voy a sacar adelante.’” [“I felt guilty, I still feel guilty, but I told the teacher, ‘Okay, my daughter is not going to repeat the year. I am going to work with her until she’s ready.’”]

By listening to many bilingual parents, I learned that stories of agency like those of Luz, Lupita and Juan Carlos, and Nancy are not uncommon. All of the parents I talked with care deeply about their chil-dren’s education. All want their children to be liter-ate in English. I was surprised by how many parents recognized that English-only instruction is harming their children’s literacy development in Spanish and leading them to speak, read, and write less in Span-ish. Parents also work to keep Spanish for family reasons: as the primary language for communicating with grandparents and older relatives, to maintain connections with family and friends in Mexico, and to facilitate helping their children with schoolwork in the parents’ stronger language.

Implications for Teaching against the Tides By studying local literacy practices, I learned les-sons that could be useful to language arts educators teaching against the tides anywhere in the US. One lesson is that there is great diversity in the educa-tional experiences and perspectives of immigrant

The multiple literacy events at Juan Carlos and Lupita’s posada celebration were all enacted in Spanish and form part of the larger literacy picture we observed in the households of participating fam-ilies who wish to support their children’s literacy development through the use of Spanish at home. While learning English is regarded as extremely important, they believe that Spanish is a resource for keeping the family united as well as for learn-ing English. In addition, most children who engage in reading and writing in English at school become translators at home for parents who are not fully literate in English; this act of translating has been shown to help children develop strong literacy in both languages (Orellana, 2009). In these ways, parents’ ideas about the value of Spanish are con-sistent with research emphasizing the importance of developing biliteracy (Crawford & Krashen, 2007; de la Luz Reyes, 2011).

Parents’ Agency: Standing up for Spanish-Speaking ChildrenThe third theme discovered by listening to bilin-gual parents concerns their strong sense of fairness and agency in standing up for their children in the context of monolingual English schooling. Nancy, a mother of three elementary school students, described her family’s experiences with English-only classes while her seven-year-old daughter was still developing literacy in Spanish, the family’s home language.

Se lo hice saber a su maestra al inicio de clases y me dijo, “Señora, no se preocupe. Usted nada más en la casa póngale televisión en inglés, libros en inglés, caricaturas en inglés, todo en inglés. Va a batallar al principio, pero ella va a aprender. Va a ver que va a aprender.”[I told the teacher at the beginning of the year that my daughter was still learning English and she told me, “Señora, don’t worry. At home, just make sure the tele-vision is in English, books are in English, comics in English, everything in English. She’ll struggle at first, but she’ll learn. You’ll see that she’ll definitely learn.]

Despite the teacher’s encouragement, Nancy wor-ried that the abrupt switch to English would mean that her daughter would learn less and fall behind her classmates. She told us, “Temía que repitiera



in school, but their concerns appeared to be based on an awareness that the standardized tests children must pass to advance to the next grade level are given in English. None of the parents in this study rejected the idea of Spanish as an academic lan-guage, and some even emphasized the importance of biliteracy, perhaps based on their own use of two written languages at work. This view was expressed most by those parents with more years of formal education, especially those who had been educated in Mexico. This finding suggests that the violence in northern Mexico, which is pushing middle-class immigrants and professionals to the US, may also bring parents who desire strong bilingual education for their children.

Learning from Bilingual Parents: Strategies and QuestionsFor teachers who want to learn from bilingual fami-lies in their communities, there are many ways to proceed. In this article, I describe methods that I used as a native speaker of Spanish and someone who is familiar with literacy instruction in Mexican schools. Knowing Spanish well enough to speak directly with parents is an obvious advantage, but perhaps less important than a sincere interest and desire to learn from families. Because many parents are learning English as an additional language, they

and bilingual parents. I began the study expect-ing to hear from working-class and poor families, including parents and grandparents who left school in order to work, and others living in border colo-nias—settlements without running water, sewage treatment, paved streets, and other services (Mier et al., 2008). I did hear from those people, but I also learned from middle-class parents with more formal education, including some with university degrees and professional careers. These families recounted different experiences and expectations of what schools should do for bilingual children. This finding is important because research on immigrant education has often focused on the poverty of Mexican newcomers (Rong & Preissle, 2009), which is not necessarily the reality for all bilingual children.

I also learned that bilingual parents have a range of attitudes concerning the role of Spanish in school, especially the relationship between knowing Spanish and learning to read and write in English. From my students, I have often heard about parents who reject bilingual education for their children in favor of English-only instruction. Teachers in the RGV even have an informal label for this practice: “bilingual refusal.” By listening to parents, I discov-ered that there is another “side of the story” (Tuten, 2007). Yes, many parents expressed concern about whether their children would learn English quickly

INTO THE CLASSROOM WITH READWRITETHINK

Learning from Bilingual Family Literacies in the Rio Grande Valley

ReadWriteThink.org designed some of its Parent & Afterschool Resources (http://www.readwritethink.org/parent-

afterschool-resources/) for Spanish-speaking parents to help support children and teens with literacy learning at home.

Links are available in both English and Spanish. We have included a cover sheet for educators to give to parents to

help explain these resources; this cover sheet is available in both English and Spanish at http://www.readwritethink

.org/Spanish.

Want to help kids and teens with their reading and writing skills, but not sure where to begin? We’ve got engaging,

step-by-step activities—just pick one and get started! So just how are you supposed to read aloud or help kids write?

Get quick and useful suggestions from the experts with our Tips and How To’s. See all of the resources at http://www.

readwritethink.org/Spanish.

—Lisa Fink

www.readwritethink.org



Try a food literacy project. Ask students to cre-ate a booklet containing the labels of the products they eat most often and explaining how they are pre-pared. Using this booklet, have students write about these foods and ask if there are favorite foods from their home countries that are difficult or expensive to buy or grow in the US. What new foods do they eat in the US? Do family cooks follow recipes that are written down and accessed in the form of a cookbook, note cards, or website, or do they work from memory? What measurement systems do they use and how did they learn them? Do children cook and, if so, for whom? Who is teaching them? Pre-paring and sharing food at home affords bilingual learners culturally and linguistically familiar oppor-tunities to develop particular forms of literacy with family members. Fortunate teachers and research-ers will be invited to sample some of the results.

Ask students to bring in examples of the reli-gious literacies of their family and to compare them with the forms they are learning to use in school. The immigrant family members in this study read the Bible and other religious texts and wrote about them as part of their participation in church groups. Children were apprenticed into religious literacies

are likely to be patient and encouraging in com-municating with teachers who are still learning to speak Spanish. Many are also accustomed to hav-ing children or other relatives and friends interpret for them in specific situations. For these reasons, I believe that even teachers who consider themselves monolingual or who are just becoming familiar with Mexican cultures can learn from the family lit-eracies of bilingual students.

There are four ideas and three questions teachers can try.

Ask students to interview their parents or care-givers about how they use reading and writing in their daily lives. Because people often think of liter-acy in terms of school, you might want to model this interview for your students using yourself or a col-league as an example. Students can keep notebooks to record home literacy practices and how family members use reading and writing every day. Because mothers are the primary managers in many immi-grant households, students may collect more exam-ples of what women do with literacy. A comparison of women’s daily reading and writing with what men read and write would be an informative component of a class research project about gender roles.

REACHING OUT TO BILINGUAL FAMILIES

Practices of linguistically diverse families can provide useful information in today’s classrooms. Although some parents

may feel apprehensive about taking an active role in their child’s classroom, there are ways teachers can make families

feel welcome. A few suggestions include:

Parent Liaisons—Teachers who do not speak the same language as their students and families may seek the aid of a

bilingual parent liaison, a parent who is willing to contact and notify parents of upcoming class events.

Parent Breakfasts—Invite parents to an informal conversation with you and/or administrators to share their feelings

on how the school can continue to support their children. Additionally, parents should feel open to share their

concerns about any issue.

Blogging—Blogging can be a multimodal, multilingual format in which parents and students communicate with

the classroom teacher and each other about their learning. Additionally, parents and students may feel comfortable

sharing their experiences with other bilingual families and students who are apprehensive about being open with the

classroom teacher.

—Eliza Allen

Third-grade teacher, Park Creek Elementary School

Dalton, Georgia



you tell them about the schools here? As a parent, what would you tell them to expect about the ways reading and writing are taught in the United States?

• If you could tell your child’s/children’s reading/language arts teachers anything they should know about working with Mexican children and families, what would you tell them?

• If you could ask any questions of the reading/language arts teachers at your child’s/children’s school, what would you ask them?

I didn’t begin my inquiry with these questions. Instead, they developed gradually as I listened to the stories of bilingual parents. Elizabeth, the mother whose words began this article, described a mutual dilemma confronting immigrant parents and teachers alike. In not knowing how to work together, Mexican immigrant parents and their chil-dren’s teachers learn to stay apart. Thus, inviting parents to answer such questions could help teach-ers better prepare to work with Mexican-origin chil-dren on the border, and could also encourage immi-grant parents to feel more confident and better able to communicate with teachers. These questions can also help us better understand how Mexican and bilingual immigrants are contributing to changes in the ways literacies and language arts are practiced and understood in the US. Understanding immi-grant parents’ views and questions about educa-tion, language, and literacy can help future teachers become more confident and more skilled in work-ing with this important and growing population.

A Final ThoughtIn closing, I would simply remind language arts educators that we have a long history of learning from parents. As a Language Arts editorial noted in 2000:

Almost all the home literacy advice and tips we’re push-ing on parents nowadays (e.g., have print in the home, read with your children, be models of reading for them, answer their questions and encourage their curiosity about print, and so on) we learned from parents in the first place! (Murphy & Dudley-Marling, 2000, p. 380)

through classes dedicated to learning the catechism or first communion and also by observing adults as they participated in religious ceremonies. Of course, not all immigrants practice these or any forms of religious literacies. However, where used, religious literacies have particular formats that are similar to school literacy formats in some ways and different in others. Drawing on these similarities and differences could open a window to how lit-eracy instruction and learning are different/similar in church and at school. Are the family’s religious literacies the same in the US as they were in Mex-ico or other countries? What is different in the US and why?

Teachers wishing to integrate numeracy and literacy can guide students in exploring and ana-lyzing the financial literacies of their own homes. Which texts represent and transact financial obli-gations (bills, contracts, healthcare forms, car pay-ments, taxes, etc.) and income (pay stubs, records of sales or services provided), and who is responsi-ble for keeping records and accounts? How do they calculate costs (on a computer, with a calculator, using pencil and paper, in their heads)? How did this person learn to keep financial records? Does the system involve a calendar or schedule of pay-ments, like the one kept by Chanel’s mother for her family? Of course, exploration and discussion of financial literacies should be respectful of families’ privacy. Rather than bring in actual bills and finan-cial records, students can study them at home and possibly discuss them with their parents and rela-tives. In school, they can talk or write about the pur-poses, forms, and producers/interpreters of family financial literacies rather than reporting actual dol-lar figures. Teachers may be surprised by the extent to which immigrant children are aware of and par-ticipate in the family economy.

In addition to these specific suggestions, I would like to offer three key questions language arts educators and researchers engaged in teacher preparation can pose for parents in immigrant communities:

• If you had relatives who were thinking about coming to the US with children, what would



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Author’s Note

I am grateful to the University of Texas Pan Ameri-can’s Summer Research Initiative and the Bascom Slemp Fellowship for research support. My thanks to Vanora Dávila for transcribing interviews, Juan de la Rosa for help with digital photography, and Adriana Hinojosa for negotiating grants. Thanks to Ligia Cuadra and the members of Apasionados por la Lectura. Sobre todo, muchísimas gracias to the Rio Grande Valley families who allowed me into their homes and helped me understand their daily literacy practices and their feelings about schools.

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Luz A. Murillo is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas Pan American and can be reached at [email protected].

Leveraging Transitive Relations for Crowdsourced Joins

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