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

宾夕法尼亚大学博士生萨拉·利皮诺加（Sarah Lipinoga）将在贝特西·赖姆斯（Betsy Rymes）博士的指导下，对家庭和学校背景下的谈判过程以及这些谈判在家庭中展开的方式进行研究。研究人员将关注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会因孩子在家庭和学校世界的谈判而改变或改变。移民的孩子经常形容自己生活在“两个世界”之间，学校是学习新价值观和新行为的特别重要的场所。墨西哥移民男性通常被认为不参与孩子的生活，因此，他们对家庭和学校空间的参与既没有得到社会科学家的充分研究，有时也被学校忽视。本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历，这些形式的互动如何随着时间的推移在制度背景下传播，并具有新的意义，创造出两个世界中的一个，以及这对学校教育和移民家庭的影响。这项研究将在宾夕法尼亚州一个新成立的墨西哥移民社区进行，这是一个高度接触的地区，新移民和当地居民第一次就共同的经历进行谈判。研究人员将采用人种学方法（参与者观察、访谈和文件收集）和话语分析方法（分析自然发生的互动录像和回放会话）相结合的方法来检查一年中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运动可以揭示对文化领域的分离性和孔隙性的更细致的理解，提供一年多的合并过程的精确描述，并确定这些谈判的权力动态是否在不同类别的人身上有所不同。研究结果可以为建立在家庭互动基础上的课程以及更好地理解移民父亲参与以促进学生成就的政策提供信息。资助这项研究也支持了社会科学家的教育。

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.