Summary Of Immigrant Family Involvement By Eileen Aaza

As immigrants, parents put much more emphasis on children’s study issues and thus children with immigrant parents are typically imbued with a strong sense of family obligation and ethnic pride, and with the importance of education which may help these children getting better grades. (Shields & Behrman, 2004)

Being a daughter of immigrant parents has never been easy here in America. Both my parents worked excessively hard to be financially stable. Unfortunately at the age of ten my life changed. I learned that my parents no longer loved each other. The arguing and fighting my parents had, only damaged me emotionally. I was too young to grasp the idea that my parents were separating which become one of the hardest times for my mom to maintain my siblings and I. Shortly after, I began attending church and fell in love with the idea of getting closer to God. Luckily, my life took an enormous turn the moment I gave my life to Christ. God has opened numerous opportunities for my education. I am proud of all the accomplishments I have achieved in high

Emergence into a new culture requires courage, toppled with humiliation. Despite the energy or the will, unfamiliar territory/language and events present unrelenting and unavoidable tensions. Hispanic students encounter teachers who fail to support them in maintaining aspects of their cultural identity. For some ELL students honoring and respecting another’s culture may diminish some of the struggles these students face.

As the daughter of an immigrant, I have witnessed the various barriers faced by immigrants, and this experience has motivated me toward my career objective. According to the Pew Research Center Hispanic Trends Project, there were about 11.3 million immigrants living illegally in the United States in 2013 (Passel et al., 2014). These immigrants come from all parts of the world for several different reasons. Whether to provide better resources for their family back home or to live a better life, these immigrants usually work in environments that can be harmful and dangerous to their health.

Do parents want to be involvement in their children’s school process? “Some teachers enrich their cultural knowledge through their interaction with parents” (Lily, 2015, p.494)

The specific topics I will be talking about is the unfairness of life of an Immigrant family in the United stated of America. While also providing my own life and struggles of income for the family and first generation children, in this case me. Also the struggle of simultstaly going to college and working will be thoroughly discussed. As a result, so will the health effects of both those tools and how they go hand to hand.

Teachers must learn about their student’s cultures if they want to educate them to the best of their ability. Many of the students in culturally diverse classrooms will want to learn in different ways. Some will want to learn in pairs, groups, as a class, or just alone. If the teacher is educated in their culture then lessons can be adjusted to appeal to every student as much as possible instead of forcing some to forget about their culture and learn like others. Students from

Immigrant youth are a significant proportion of our national student population today. Many of us don’t realize how many immigrant children there really are. In her interview, “The Education of Immigrant Children”, posted by Harvard Graduate School of Education on December 11, 2014, Mary Tamer, a graduate student, speaks to Harvard Professor Natasha Warikoo in order to inquire into some of the issues immigrant children face in their lives. According to Tamer, by 2050 more than one-third of school children will be an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant (Tamer). One-third is a largely substantial number, and reflects this as a substantial issue. Though how much is our immigrant population growing? In March 2005, during the National Conference of State Legislators, Ann Morse brought forth a report that she had drafted to reflect on the details of immigration and to announce how programs were doing which had been created and funded to improve and support immigrant youth. Due to this report, there are “current high levels of immigration - over 1 million per year” (Morse). Again, as our immigrant population grows, it increasingly becomes apparent that we cannot ignore this issue. But this large amount begs the question, what about our teaching population? Well, according Professor Warikoo, “our teaching force is more than 80 percent white, while over half of children today are racial minorities” (Tamer). Most teachers today aren’t able to personally connect or relate with

In my future class, I want to assign a project to my students that has them research their family history. In their project I would like them to interview four family members with specific questions to what they know about their family’s immigration process. Interviewing grandparents from both sides of the family is ideal. Then after the interviewing process, I would like them to create a poster explaining where their family originated from and some information about that place. Along with the poster and interviews, I would like the students to write a short essay of more facts and traditions from the places that their family immigrated from. After all my students have turned in their project, I would like to make a big class poster with the

When discussing parenting, there are many ideas involved. This can range from how you discipline your child, to how you teach them, but does anyone really think about what they are teaching their children outside the school’s curriculum nowadays? Leonard Sax’s thesis of this passage really brings a new and somewhat unspoken view of parenting from over the years. Do we not teach our children as much of our culture as Sax states? I feel that we are focusing our efforts around teaching about other cultures rather than the one our children, and we ourselves, are a part of. This, to me, also leads into the thought that maybe we do not teach about our culture here in the US as much because the US has grown to be a “melting pot” of cultures, and we

As an educator it is important to be aware of the various learners in the classroom as well as being able to shift lessons accordingly to adapt to a greater number of students. In addition it is essential that culturally responsive practices is adapted in the classroom in order for all students to have a sense of belonging and are able to participate. For this reason, a teacher must actively use culturally responsive practices to engage students and their families because it helps to develop a relationship and maintain a level of communication. Learning “facts” about different cultures is not enough, it is more important that we make

Chavkin emphasized the importance of parent’s school involvement among Hispanic and African American families. Documenting her research process Chavkin reported important opinions made by African American and Hispanic parents. In her research, the majority of parents who participated in the study truly believe that the most important key towards student academic success is parent support and involvement. Ultimately, this informative and interesting study represents an important contribution to my research topic by pointing out parent opinions about the idea of parent school involvement, which essentially is the key answer that I want to research and discover.

Although the influence of parental and cultural expectations can have negative effects on academic achievement, studies also show that direct parental involvement and their cultural implementation can positively affect students’ performance. When parents assist their child in assimilating to both the native and dominant culture by agreeing on the significance of education, they provide the student with the tools to transition properly in an academic environment. Research conducted by Davis-Kean and Sexton suggests that “parents of non-American origins who have pursued higher forms of education that provide supportive encouragement to embrace both the American and native cultural values perform better in school” (2009,290). Fram, Miller-Cribbs,

Family Theory (Jones & Vagle, 2013) - proposed a vision of social class–sensitive pedagogy targeting disrupting special need classes in US urban schools. Jones and Vagle (2013) asserted that teachers’ perceptions of immigrant ESL students in the inner-cities schools influence students’ performance and families’ behaviors.

It may come to no surprise to many families and educators in the United States that families actively participating in their children’s academic life (school, homework, extracurricular activities) is a key component in unlocking their children(s)’ success in school. The struggle that educators face is the lack of understanding or lack of knowledge about how families in other cultures view parental involvement. It is important for educators to understand that not all families will have the same viewpoints on parental involvement, and educators themselves may have different opinions about parental involvement that are not unanimously shared among colleagues. This research paper aims to provide an in depth review of how parental involvement is viewed in different cultures present in the United States. This paper will provide discussion regarding how differing culture views affect education in the classroom. Furthermore, this paper should provide educators with strategies on how to recognize, accept, and encourage family participation in all cultures present in the United States. This paper will focus on cultural views from European American Families, Hispanic/Latino Americans, and cultural views based on family dynamics (single parents, income-classes, same-sex parents).