Luz A. Murillo
page
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Learning from Bilingual
Family Literacies
“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 experiences, 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 Tides
My 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 deficit 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 classrooms, 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 programs 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 suggesting 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 living in poverty and/or with parents with limited formal education, this combination is especially devastating (Meyer, 2009).
Language Arts, Volume 90 Number 1, September 2012
Copyright © 2012 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
Luz A. Murillo | Learning from Bilingual Family Literacies
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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 business, 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 disrespect 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 citizens. 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 Learning
The 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 easternmost 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
19
levels of community bilingualism, Spanish is sometimes 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 acaListening carefully to parents
demic skills in two languages. Spanish is offered
is one way that language
as an academic subject
arts teachers can begin to
in high school and college, where it is treated
create bridges “across which
essentially as a foreign
children’s talents beyond
language. A preservice
teacher noted the irony of
subject matter achievement
this situation, observing,
can be recognized and used.”
“We are scolded in elementary school for speaking 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
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from the economic centers of the US and Mexico,
the population grew quickly in the 1990s following the passage of the North American Free Trade
Agreement and subsequent increase in the number
of maquiladoras (factories that produce components 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 economic development have been channeled to economic 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 priAs a native speaker of Spanish vate religious (often bilingual) schools in the US,
from Colombia, I studied school
but most cannot afford
and community literacies in private education. Some
lack the legal documents
Mexico before working on
needed to rent a home or
the border. These experiences apartment and to obtain
a driver’s license, bank
helped me develop strong
account, or other form of
rapport with parents. identification. Despite the
economic growth of the
Valley over the past two decades, many residents are
undocumented, unemployed or underpaid, and suffer limited access to health and educational services
(Mier et al., 2008; Richardson & Resendiz, 2006).
Bilingual Parents Talk about School
Gathering 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 literacies practiced by bilingual families. To do this,
I gathered several types of data, including observations 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 participants 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 university 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 parents 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 Lectura [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 university to speak with preservice teachers. Their presentations were in the form of testimonios (Saavedra, 2011)—powerful expressions of each parent’s
personal experiences with schools and beliefs about
how teachers and schools should work with immigrant 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 participants commented that they felt comfortable discussing 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.
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Through these experiences, we developed a
sense of mutual confianza [trust] that made it possible 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 practices 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, Rogers, & 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 digital 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 identifying 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 identified 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 theoretical framework of subaltern knowledge (Anzaldúa,
2007; Mignolo, 2000). Specifically, this meant
asking what we can learn about literacy by treating 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 development at home; 2) support for children’s literacy
development through the use of Spanish at home;
and 3) parents’ agency in children’s education.
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Family Support for Literacy
Development at Home
By listening to parents, my students and I learned
about the rich literacy environments bilingual children 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
Through these experiences,
pseudonyms), a fourthgrade classroom teacher
we developed a sense of
who is earning a master’s
mutual confianza [trust] that
degree in reading, shared
stories about the readmade it possible for me to
ing abilities of Chanel,
interview participating parents
who had been labeled “at
risk” by virtue of her famin their homes.
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 grandparents, 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 family events and important tasks:
I was also astonished when I heard how her mother
used an intricate system to manage household tasks.
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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 setting a reminder on her phone.
At Laura’s suggestion, I interviewed Chanel’s
mother, Luz, at the family home. She described herself as “an organized person who has to write everything down” and told me about her educational history 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 practices she engages in as the “manager” in the household. She explained that she uses four different
colors on the household calendar, each reflecting a
different type of activity or member of the household. 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 calendar is shown in Figure 2.
Our conversation and a tour of the home confirmed Laura’s observation that the calendar system
is just one of the many literacy examples found in
this bilingual household. In addition to using multiple intertextual supports for recording and remembering important dates, Luz commented that she
employs different forms of literacy for different
purposes. For example, she maintains a system of
Figure 2. Luz’s calendar
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 members 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 medication, 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 importance 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 Spanish-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 Mexican 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 household, 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 provides 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 development starts for children before they come to school
(Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979; Tolchinsky, 2003).
They can help teachers challenge common misconceptions 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.
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Support for Children’s Literacy
Development through Home Use
of Spanish
A 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 Carlos are highly engaged in their two children’s education. 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 bilingualism 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 understood 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 program they attend. Lupita and Juan Carlos are Spanish-dominant professionals with degrees in journalism 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.
Over the course of our interview and informal
conversations, Lupita and Juan Carlos came to realize 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 congregation. 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 shelter. 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 provided 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 individual and group prayers, some of which involved
recitation of lengthy oral texts from memory. Children 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.
Figure 3. Children write letters to El Niño Dios at Christmas.
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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 families 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 learning 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 consistent with research emphasizing the importance of
developing biliteracy (Crawford & Krashen, 2007;
de la Luz Reyes, 2011).
Parents’ Agency: Standing Up
for Spanish-Speaking Children
The third theme discovered by listening to bilingual 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 Englishonly 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 television 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 worried 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
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 concerned. 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 difficulty 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 children’s education. All want their children to be literate 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 Spanish. 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 lessons 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 educational experiences and perspectives of immigrant
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and bilingual parents. I began the study expecting to hear from working-class and poor families,
including parents and grandparents who left school
in order to work, and others living in border colonias—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 discovered that there is another “side of the story” (Tuten,
2007). Yes, many parents expressed concern about
whether their children would learn English quickly
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 language, 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.
25
Learning from Bilingual Parents:
Strategies and Questions
For teachers who want to learn from bilingual families 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
INTO T H E C L A S S R O O M W I T H R E A D W R I T E T H I N K
Learning from Bilingual Family Literacies in the Rio Grande Valley
ReadWriteThink.org designed some of its Parent & Afterschool Resources (http://www.readwritethink.org/parentafterschool-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
Language Arts, Volume 90 Number 1, September 2012
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are likely to be patient and encouraging in communicating with teachers who are still learning to
speak Spanish. Many are also accustomed to having 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 literacies of bilingual students.
There are four ideas and three questions teachers
can try.
Ask students to interview their parents or caregivers about how they use reading and writing in
their daily lives. Because people often think of literacy in terms of school, you might want to model this
interview for your students using yourself or a colleague 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 immigrant households, students may collect more examples 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.
Try a food literacy project. Ask students to create a booklet containing the labels of the products
they eat most often and explaining how they are prepared. 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? Preparing and sharing food at home affords bilingual
learners culturally and linguistically familiar opportunities to develop particular forms of literacy with
family members. Fortunate teachers and researchers will be invited to sample some of the results.
Ask students to bring in examples of the religious 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
REACHING O U T T O B I L I N G U A L FA M I L I E S
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
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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 literacy 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 Mexico or other countries? What is different in the US
and why?
Teachers wishing to integrate numeracy and
literacy can guide students in exploring and analyzing the financial literacies of their own homes.
Which texts represent and transact financial obligations (bills, contracts, healthcare forms, car payments, taxes, etc.) and income (pay stubs, records
of sales or services provided), and who is responsible 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 payments, 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 financial records, students can study them at home and
possibly discuss them with their parents and relatives. In school, they can talk or write about the purposes, forms, and producers/interpreters of family
financial literacies rather than reporting actual dollar figures. Teachers may be surprised by the extent
to which immigrant children are aware of and participate 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
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 children’s teachers learn to stay apart. Thus, inviting
parents to answer such questions could help teachers better prepare to work with Mexican-origin children on the border, and could also encourage immigrant 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 immigrant parents’ views and questions about education, language, and literacy can help future teachers
become more confident and more skilled in working with this important and growing population.
A Final Thought
In 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 pushing 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)
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28
A remaining challenge, one that is critically important for teachers who work with children on the
US–Mexico border and in other immigrant communities, is to extend our expertise to include learning
from and with bilingual families.
Author’s Note
I am grateful to the University of Texas Pan American’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].
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