Culturally Contested Pedagogy: Battles of Literacy and Schooling between Mainstream Teachers and Asian Immigrant Parents

7. Learning from the Battles: Toward a Pedagogy of Cultural Reciprocity

CHAPTER SEVEN Learning from the Battles Toward a Pedagogy of Cultural Reciprocity This study has represented a journey toward an understanding of the education of immigrant children in unique, contemporary social spaces. Unlike the widely researched, lower SES minority children , the Chinese children were from middle-class backgrounds and attended a white middle-class school where they substantially outnumbered children of other backgrounds. Their parents “educationalized ” their learning at home through after-school classes and they held values about literacy education that aligned with conservative phonics instruction, an approach criticized as “bad teaching” by many North American educators, including the two focal teachers who believed in a more holistic approach to literacy. This study has showed how the teachers and the parents, coming from different sociocultural backgrounds, differed in their social positioning and in their beliefs and perspectives about literacy and schooling. It has also demonstrated that their different beliefs and perspectives shaped and constructed their children’s qualitatively different school and home learning experiences. These experiences revealed that culturally contested pedagogy and the differential power imbalance between school and home had had a significant impact on the children’s learning and development and had become a risk factor to their achieving academic success. To help these children overcome this risk factor is a dauntingly challenging task. The teachers were placed in a difficult position: they were faced with a large number of ESL students from one cultural background with little professional preparation or support. Moreover, 207 they were confronted with the problem of dealing with parents who opposed their holistic, progressive approaches to literacy instruction. Their dedication to providing quality education to the children inevitably led them to battle against the parents’ approaches to literacy , which they perceived as stifling the children’s natural learning and creativity. However, like many teachers in similar situations, they had few opportunities to consider the implicit values of their own middle-class background and to explore and observe students’ lives out of school contexts (McCarthey, 1997, 1999), nor had they been able to critically reflect on the social relations between school and home. Without being informed of the students’ individual and sociocultural backgrounds or an understanding of their own practices and the intricate social relations, the teachers’ battles could only lead to more misconceptions and misunderstandings, further intensified by the conflicts between school and home. The parents were also placed in a difficult situation. While the teachers viewed the difficulties the children experienced as the result of inappropriate parental involvement, the parents viewed their actions and involvement as a response to school practices that did not meet their expectations. Like all immigrants, they faced the challenge of not only learning to adapt to life in Canadian society themselves, but also learning how to help their children adapt to a different school system. Coming from a culture that highly valued academic learning, the parents were dissatisfied with the school practices, especially when their children failed to acquire literacy skills necessary for “making it” in the future. Their dissatisfaction with school practices led to their effort to battle against school practices and encouraged remedial interventions at home using their own resources. Although their middle-class status afforded them advantages to survive economically in Canada and resources to help their children, several factors —such as their own limited English language ability, their minority status, their lack of educational experiences in Canada, and their social isolation from the mainstream society—prevented them from having an adequate understanding of Canadian school practices. Their lack of informed knowledge of Canadian schooling also became a catalyst for conflicts between school and home. So can the enduring battles between the “natural enemies” (Lareau, 2000; Waller, 1932) be resolved? What have we learned from the experiences of the teachers, parents, and students? How can we help teachers be responsive to minority cultures, learn what they do not know about minority beliefs, and accommodate what they do not 208 Culturally Contested Pedagogy believe in? How can we help parents learn what they do not know and accommodate the school practices that they do not believe in? How can we help teachers and parents create better ways to communicate and work together for the benefit of children? The conflicts and complexities of minority schooling uncovered in this study reveal that there is a need to rewrite the discourse of literacy and difference. Giroux (1991) suggests that this rewriting process involves reconstructing the...