Mind the Gap: Parents' Efforts to Support College-Bound Students in Appalachia

This study provides a counter to the narrative that parents, particularly those of first-generation college students, in rural, central Appalachia are barriers to their children's transition to college. By centering parents' perspectives in two families in a rural community and two families from the rural periphery of a suburban community, this study examines how parents understood their role in their children's postsecondary transition. Data are drawn from a critical ethnography spanning the spring of the students' senior high school year into their first semester of college. Using a funds of knowledge framework, the study identified knowledge regarding applying to college, building aspirations, drawing upon social networks, and critiquing economic inequalities at work within the first-generation students' parents' descriptions of their effort. These forms of knowledge were leveraged to support their children's access to college, even though these were forms of knowledge that were not seen by the students' teachers or school administrators. We argue that the funds of knowledge framework, with careful attention to the function of whiteness, can be used to name the assets within White working-class and first-generation families that are unrecognized within schools. To create equitable contexts for first-generation students' postsecondary success, schools should be responsible for reducing the gap of support, and repositioning assumptions about how parents value education can help in that effort. Schools need to actively engage parents in the postsecondary planning process early in high school in ways that recognize parents' value for education, as well as the gaps parents may have in knowledge about the college preparation process.