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

由Betsy Rymes博士监督的宾夕法尼亚大学博士生Sarah Lipinoga将研究家庭和学校环境中的谈判过程以及这些谈判在家庭中展开的方式。研究人员将专注于墨西哥移民父亲和孩子的日常互动，以调查父亲的参与是否改变或改变了他们的孩子的家庭和学校世界的谈判。 移民的孩子经常描述自己生活在“两个世界”之间，学校是学习新价值观和行为的特别重要的场所。墨西哥移民男子往往被定型为不参与他们的孩子的生活，因此，他们在家庭和学校空间的参与都是由社会科学家和学校忽视的sometimes研究。这项研究的目的是调查以前被忽视的移民父亲和他们的孩子之间的互动是否构成教育经验，这些互动形式如何随着时间的推移跨越制度背景，以采取新的意义，创造一个两个世界，以及这对学校和移民家庭的影响。一个新移民和当地居民第一次就共同经历进行谈判的高度接触区。 研究人员将采用民族志的方法相结合（参与观察，访谈，和文献收集）和语篇分析方法（分析录像的自然发生的互动和回放会话）研究一年来在家庭和学校环境中收集的数据。跟踪六个家庭的语言和符号资源的移动可以揭示对分离和文化领域的孔隙度，提供一年多的整合过程的精确描述，并确定这些谈判的权力动态是否针对不同类别的人以不同的方式展开。调查结果可能会通知课程，建立在家庭为基础的互动，以及政策，更好地了解移民父亲的参与，以促进学生的成绩。资助这项研究也支持社会科学家的教育。

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.