Abstract
Recent research on the kindergarten transition highlights the importance of alignment across contexts to provide high-quality interactions. Yet, we know less about how families make sense of their experiences in the transition. This chapter explores families' experiences with the kindergarten transition from a funds of knowledge perspective. Results from a qualitative interview study of schools' recognition of families' funds of knowledge during the kindergarten transition are presented. Families in the study discussed parent-initiated involvement and disconnects between school perceptions of their home culture and their own self understandings. The authors argue that understanding families' own experiences with the transition is an important step in conceptualizing families' involvement in their children's education.
TopBackground
The transition from to kindergarten provides an opportunity for reflection on the progress children have made, but it is also a time for uncertainty for children and families, which can be overwhelming. For parents, this transition is a time to reflect on how much their children have grown physically, academically, and socially, and to identify if they are ready for kindergarten. Parents are also understood to play a key role in the transition: preschool and kindergarten teachers both must develop trusting relationships with parents, as this can promote parent involvement in the child’s education (Yelverton & Mashburn, 2018). Yet, teacher-family contact decreases across the transition to kindergarten, with the frequency of home visits declining and content of written correspondence having a more negative valence (Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 1999). Compounding the matter, the kindergarten transition is a key time for educational equity, as low-income families benefit most from transition programs, yet are among the least likely to actually access the programs (Schulting et al., 2005). Understanding the relationships between families and schools is relevant to resolving this disconnect.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Deficit-Oriented Perspective: An explanation of school problems as being primarily a matter of disadvantaged groups’ internal deficiencies. Deficit-oriented perspectives traditionally invoked biological determinist accounts of disadvantaged groups’ outcomes (e.g. suggesting a student from a disadvantaged racial/ethnic group or social class has poor outcomes on a measure because of genetic differences). Today deficit-oriented perspectives invoke culture-level deficiencies to explain disparities (e.g. suggesting families from a disadvantaged racial/ethnic group or social class do not value education and are uninvolved in their children’s lives).
Sociohistorical Psychology: A school within psychology heavily influenced by the works of Lev Vygotsky and later neo-Vygotskyan scholars. The sociohistorical perspective integrates individual (intrapersonal), social (interpersonal), and cultural/historical contributors to human development and posits that they are not meaningfully separable. Within this view, individual children’s development, family processes, and institutions like schooling are all contextualized within social context and historical time. In this view, goals of development are understood as socially constructed within cultural and historical contexts.
Purposeful Sampling: A typical sampling practice found in qualitative research intended to capitalize on smaller sample sizes and information-rich cases, in contrast with the random sampling that is typical in statistical research. At least 40 variations of purposeful sampling are recognized by qualitative researchers and each variation is designed to achieve a different research goal (e.g. identifying a single significant case, facilitating comparisons within the sample, maximizing or minimizing variation on a specific characteristic within the sample).
Parental Involvement: A multifaceted form of parent engagement that includes direct interaction in daily activities with a child, being accessible to a child, and taking responsibility for a child’s needs such as attending parent-teacher conferences or taking a child to appointments.
Recognition of Funds of Knowledge: Noticing of families’ funds of knowledge by schools and related institutions so that the funds can be activated. Misrecognition occurs when families’ funds are not only unacknowledged, but actively devalued by schools and related institutions.
Funds of Knowledge: Historically developed and accumulated knowledge and strategies that are central for household function and family members’ well-being. Includes skills, abilities, ideas, and practices.
Semi-Structured Interview: An interviewing strategy in which interview questions that is associated with interpretivist and constructionist research traditions. An interviewing strategy designed to co-construct data, recognizing the active role of the researcher. Semi-structured interviews can involve scripted questions, but the sequence of questions asked and wording are typically adapted to maintain rapport and respond to each interviewee’s constructed meanings.