Africa
Development, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, 2012, pp. 57 – 67
© Council
for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2012
(ISSN 0850-3907)
Mothers’
Constructions of their Roles in the Literacy Education of their Children
Ngozi Anyikwa* and Ngozi Obidike**
Abstract
This paper presents findings from a
study that examined how mothers from a middle-income neighbourhood
conceptualized their roles in their children’s literacy education. Based on
interviews and observations focussed on ten mothers involvement in their
children’s literacy education, a framework that expounds typical
characterizations of parent involvement was developed which supports practices
that are both traditionally visible and invisible to the school and highlights
how parents act as ‘intellectual resources’ in their children’s literacy
education. The findings show that traditional understandings of parental
involvement may overlook ways that middle-income parents deliberately involve
themselves in their children’s education. Challenges that these parents face in
relation to their involvement in their children’s literacy education were
identified.
Key Words: Literacy education; Mothers’ involvement; Invisible
support systems
Résumé
Cette étude présente les conclusions
d’une étude portant sur la manière dont les mères issues d’un quartier de la
classe moyenne ont conceptualisé leurs rôles dans l’éducation de base de leurs
enfants. Sur la base d’interviews et d’observations portant sur l’implication
de dix mères dans l’éducation de base de leurs enfants, un cadre qui expose les
caractérisations typiques de l’implication des parents a été élaboré, prenant
en charge des pratiques traditionnelles
visibles ou invisibles à l’école, et souligne comment ces parents agissent
comme « ressources intellectuelles » pour l’éducation de base de leurs enfants.
Les conclusions soulignent le risque de voir l’implication des parents -au sens
où on l’entend traditionnellement- ne pas prendre en ligne de compte cette
forme d’implication volontaire des parents issus de la classe moyenne. L’étude
a identifié les défis confrontant ces parents pour leur implication dans
l’éducation de base de leurs enfants.
*
Department of early Childhood and Primary Education, Nnamdi Azikiwe University,
Awka, Nigeria. Email: ngozianyikwa@yahoo.com
**Department
of early Childhood and Primary Education, Nnamdi Azikiwe
University,
Awka, Nigeria. Email: drngoobidike@yahoo.co.uk
58
Introduction
It is widely acknowledged that
for children to maximize their potential from schooling, they need the full
involvement of their parents (Desforges and Abouchaar 2003; Baker and Soden
1998; Muller 1993; Reynolds 1993; Stevenson and Baker 1987). Parents are children’s
first and best teachers, and parents can do a variety of things to support
their children’s literacy development. Parental involvement with children and
the school are a critical factor that can produce great benefits for everyone
concerned (Henderson and Berla 1997). A substantial body of evidence confirms
the benefits of parental involvement in children’s education and literacy
activities (Kellaghan, Sloane, Alvarez and Bloom 1993; Desforges and Abouchaar
2003; Denessen 2007). Research shows that parental involvement has more
positive effect on the education and literacy development of their children
than other family background variables, such as social class, family size, and
level of parental education (Flouri and Buchanan 2004); that it improves
student emotional well-being (Allen and Daly 2002; Desforges and Abouchaar
2003; Epstein 2005); that parents reading with their children at home yields
positive results on language comprehension, reading achievement, and expressive
language skills (Gest, Freemen, Domitrovich and Welsh 2004); and that parent
involvement leads to improved educational performance, greater cognitive
competence, and greater problem-solving skills and fewer behavioural problems
(Epstein, Sanders, Simon, Salinas, Jansorn,
and Van Voorhis 2002; Fan and Chen 2001; NMSA 2003; Van Voorhis 2003).
More research also shows that parents’ involvement in children’s learning
positively affects the children’s performance at school (Fan and Chen 2001;
Morrison 2007; Feinstein and Symons 1999); improves pupils’ interest in
reading, attitudes towards reading and attentiveness in the classroom (Rowe
1991); fosters better student classroom behaviour and fewer behavioural
problems at school (Fan and Chen 2001; NMSA 2003; Melhuish, Symons, Siraj-Blatchard
and Targgart 2001); and that parental involvement in their children’s reading
is the most important determinant of language and emergent literacy (Bus, van
Ijzendon and Pellegrini 1995).
Parental
involvement is the participation and support of parents at school and in the
home, which directly and positively impacts the educational performance of
their children. Dixon (1992), Desforges and Abouchaar (2003), and Gonzalez-Mena
(2011) define parental involvement as a combination of commitment and active
participation on the part of the parent to the school and child. There are two
broad categories to parental involvement namely: parents’ involvement in the
life of the school and parents’ involvement in support of the child at home and
school. The term parent
59
involvement is used when schools are the unit of analysis
and children’s academic achievement is the primary focus (Lawson 2003). Lawson
argues that research on parent involvement looks at how parents are engaged in
activities that are designed by the school and their involvement tends to be
classified along a ‘schoolcentric’ continuum. On this continuum, parents have
little power over school decision-making processes, and their involvement
ranges from participating in extra-curricular school-sponsored activities to
serving as classroom assistants or participating on a school council serving as
partners in problem solving. Epstein (1996) created a typology that
characterizes six categories of ways that schools can be involved with parents.
He offered these types of school and family connections as a framework that
schools can use in developing programmes to encourage relationships with
parents. This widely accepted framework is proposed as a guide to help
educators develop comprehensive family-school partnerships. The six types of
parental involvement identified by Epstein (1996) include:
(i)
parenting (helping families with child-rearing
and parenting skills);
(ii)
communicating (developing effective home-school
communication);
(iii)
volunteering (creating ways that families can
become involved in activities at the school);
(iv)
learning at home (supporting learning activities
in the home thatreinforce school curricula);
(v)
decision-making (including families as
decision-makers through school-site councils, committees, etc.) and
(vi) collaborating
with the community (matching community serviceswith family needs and serving
the community).
Epstein’s typology validates the
work that parents do in the home as well as the school in support of their
children’s schooling. But the types of connections identified privilege the
school’s role in determining what counts as parents involvement. However, it is
not evident that this characterization of parent involvement begins with
exploration of what parents do already for their children, in ways visible and
invisible to the school.
Because
parent involvement is most often evaluated from the school’s vantage point,
parents whose activities do not look like the traditionally accepted behaviours
associated with parent involvement or are not visible in the school are often
classified in the literature as being minimally involved and most often,
low-income parents are classified in this way (Lawson 2003; Lareau 2000;
Lightfoot 2004). Researchers vary on the ways they frame low-income parents’
minimal involvement. Lareau (1987) identified three perspectives taken in the
literature. Some subscribe to the culture of
60
poverty thesis, arguing that
lower class culture has distinct values and forms of social organization, and
thus lower class families do not value education as highly as middle class
families. Others accuse schools of institutional discrimination, claiming that
they make middle class families feel more comfortable than lower class
families. Finally, some researchers argue that institutional differentiation,
particularly the role of the teacher leadership, is a critical determinant of
parental involvement in schooling. While these stances are different from one
another in critical ways, they all operate from the schoolcentric model. That
is, they seek to explain low levels of involvement among low-income parents
from the vantage point of the school.
Building on this perspective, this
research explored the ways parents can and do act as resources for their
children’s education. Through examining the activities of ten mothers, we asked
the following questions:
(a) How
do Nigerian mothers in a middle-income neighbourhoodconceptualize their roles
in their children’s education?
(b) What
are the challenges they face in enacting these roles?
Our purpose is to use concrete examples of parents’
practices in relation to their children’s literacy education to construct a
framework for examining parent involvement and to illustrate ways that parents
serve as intellectual resources for their children’s learning. Our findings are
not representative of all Nigerian mothers.
Methods
Ten mothers living in a
middle-income neighbourhood located in Onitsha, Onitsha North Local Government
Area in Anambra State, South-East Nigeria, whose children attend a public
primary school in the area, participated in the study. It is important to note
that while we speak to issues related to parent involvement, all of our data
come from mothers. This is in line with Gadsden’s position that mothers are
often the default category in parent-child studies (Gadsden 2002). Although the
mothers live in the same neighbourhood, there were distinct variations in their
demographic variables such as age, level of education, employment status and
household description (their ages ranged from 27–52 years, seven have Bachelors
Degree, while three have National Certificates in Education; five had full-time
employment while the rest are unemployed and eight lived in a two-parent
household with two living as single mothers).
Data for the
study were gathered through semi-structured interviews. The purpose of the
interview was to get specific and in-depth information from a representative of
Nigerian mothers on their thoughts and experiences with their own and their
children’s literacy education, both in school and
61
out of school as well as details
about their relationship/interactions with their children’s school and teachers
and the challenges, if any, they face in enacting this role. Each mother was
interviewed for approximately 45-60 minutes using a predetermined set of
questions. Eight out of the ten interviews took place in the homes of the
participants which allowed the researchers to observe practices and artefacts
related to the parents’ descriptions. The remaining two interviews took place
in the school as requested by the two participants. The interviews were audio
recorded and later transcribed.
We started the analysis by first
reading through the interviews and field notes from home observations to
identify the salient cross-cutting themes and patterns in the parents’
perspectives and practices. Later, we looked for themes across parents. Our
analysis of the themes shed light on a number of patterns in the ways these
parents were involved in their children’s literacy education that may not have
been discovered using the ‘schoolcentric’ approach. We examined these themes in
the light of Epstein’s six types of involvement, looking for overlap, conflicts
and additional types of involvement.
Results
The results of our study showed that some of the ways the
participants were involved in their children’s literacy education may not fit
the ‘schoolcentric’ definitions of parental involvement, given that the ten
mothers interviewed were highly involved in their children’s education. We
found that all the mothers played clear roles as advocates for their children’s
education and made personal efforts to identify and create opportunities for
their children’s learning outside of school. First, we explore the forms that
their advocacy took and then consider the different ways the parents positioned
themselves as advocates. Second, we look at the ways they created learning
opportunities for their children outside of school.
Mothers as Advocates for their Children’s
Education
All the mothers interviewed took
their roles as advocates for their children’s education seriously. They showed
evidence of thinking proactively and strategically with great expectations
about their children’s futures and the kinds of opportunities they wanted them
to have. Some mothers indicated that they expected their children to grow up
and become prominent people in society. A participant aged 39, who is a mother
of three children aged eight, ten, and twelve said, ‘I look forward to seeing
my children becoming prominent men and women in the society. I want them to be
doctors, lawyers, engineers or university lecturers’. Specifically, these
mothers clearly expected their children to do well in school and become
university graduates and get
62
good and well paying jobs. This
position is supported by (Sailor 2004) who stated that majority of the parents
want their children to perform well in school academically and behaviourally.
However, most of them admitted that meeting this goal is an uphill task and would
require overcoming considerable barriers. For instance, a participant aged 44
and a mother of two children aged eight and eleven said ‘finding a good school
for the kids, being able to pay the school fees, providing books and materials
required and meeting up with school runs are quite a challenge’. This is why
they all acknowledged the importance of education in the aspirations of their
children. The desires of these mothers were not limited to success in school.
Several parents were clear about their responsibilities in raising their
children in their particular social context. Independence was a strong theme in
the voices of these mothers. A participant aged 40 and a mother of four
children aged six, eight, ten and twelve said, ‘I want my children to become
independent so as to be able to do things on their own with or without help. I
give them responsibilities for household chores as early as five/six years like
sweeping the house, washing of plates, fetching water, emptying dust bins etc.
They all indicated the importance of independence and self-reliance and
expected their children to become independent and self-reliant from an early
age. This informed the way they reared the children – some gave their children
responsibilities which included household chores as early as possible.
The aspirations these mothers had for
their children’s futures made them play an advocacy role in their children’s
education. While only four of the mothers we interviewed were able to spend
considerable amount of time at the school, all ten found ways to monitor their
children’s progress through checking daily school work to ensure daily note
copying, assignment copying and passing of assignment for marking They checked
for teacher errors sometimes, writing notes to teachers, visiting the
classroom, discussing with the teachers and, assisting with homework,
navigating the terrain of an unfamiliar approach to teaching literacy by
discussing with the teacher in order to understand and learn a particular
approach. They did so in order to teach it to their children and also ensure
that they were doing it right, and found information or resources they needed
to address gaps in their understanding through using encyclopaedias, CD
software on reading and writing for children and also employing a paid teacher
for extra lessons at home for their children.
Monitoring Progress
We noted how closely the mothers
in this study monitored their children’s progress in school. They had all
developed strategies for gathering information about their children’s school
work on a regular basis and seemed to know
63
how well their children were doing at school and where they
were having difficulty. A greater number of them used homework or some other
activities to monitor their children’s progress. A participant explained how
she uses note writing to the teacher to clear up confusion over homework.
Good morning, Aunty Nkem, Ugonna came back with his
homework on reading comprehension, but did not understand exactly what he is
asked to do with it. Could you please be specific so he will be properly
guided?
Some mothers were able to spend time at school to monitor
their children’s progress while others explained that they used homework or
other activities at home to monitor their progress and still some others used
conversation and shared reading to monitor their children’s progress and
usually write notes to teachers to clear up confusion over homework.
Homework Assistance
As shown earlier, the participants indicated that they
played a great role in assisting their children with homework. It was evident
that most mothers had routines and structures associated with homework. They
explained that they encouraged their children to do their homework alone,
without assistance, and then they mark and correct them. Sometimes they hire a
private lesson teacher at their expense to help with the school work when it
became too difficult. That is, the participants employ a private teacher to
teach their children difficult school work they do not have the capacity to
handle at home after school on a number of agreed days in a week at a specific
time.
Provision of Learning Opportunities Outside of
School
Another pattern that cut across
the entire participants is the extent to which they provided learning
opportunities for their children outside of school that may not be visible to
the school and may not be understood as parental involvement in the
‘schoolcentric’ definition. These opportunities took the form of daily,
household, or family activities that the mothers saw as educational examples,
teaching children certain words and pronunciation through games like Scrabble,
Monopoly, and chess; through family activities like birthdays; Mothers and
Fathers Day, cultural festivals like New Yam festival, Christmas and New Year
celebrations where children are asked to write up a plan and their expectations
for the party and a speech for the occasion; and during cooking, where children
are asked to spell and read out the cooking instructions including ingredients
and method of cooking. Some of these opportunities were spontaneous, while
others were calculated and included purchase of educational materials. It is
worthy of note that
64
these mothers provided distinct
learning experiences such as pronunciation, spelling and meaning of words and
sentences for their children in reading and writing, as well as other
experiences that were not subject-specific; for example, taking them to the
state library and zoo. All these examples are ways that enhance the literacy
development of children which the home offers but not quite recognized as
‘schoolcentric’ activities.
In creating informal learning
opportunities outside of school, three mothers explained that they ask their
children to spell the various items in the home in general, writings on
billboards and pronounce them properly to improve the literacy education of their
children. They also buy books (for example, the Ladybird series), educational
games and materials such as scrabble, give them books as gifts on their
birthdays, watch literacy-related television programmes such as Sesame Street
and purchase educational CDs and DVDs on reading and writing that fit the mould
of school-based activities.
Discussion
This paper has looked at how
Nigerian mothers in a middle-income neighbourhood conceptualized their roles in
their children’s literacy education. We found parents to be involved in their
children’s education in a variety of ways. Yet, the forms their involvement
took were not typically recognized as parent involvement, particularly when
articulated by those working in schools. The aspects of parental involvement of
the ten mothers interviewed include involvement in children’s learning and
involvement in children’s schooling.
By
involvement in children’s learning, we mean the ways that mothers work to
structure, foster, support their children’s learning in a variety of contexts,
not just those that are related to school. All the ten mothers in the study
engaged substantially in this form of involvement. For example, as mentioned
earlier, some mothers reported using various items in their homes to improve
the literacy education of their children. This is not in line with Lawson
(2003), who observed that parent involvement when used by the schools is
understood as activity that is visible to school officials and teachers, such
as volunteering in the child’s classroom or attending school meetings. However,
this finding is supported by Epstein (1996), who included both schools and
homes as sites for involvement.
Involvement
in children’s schooling refers to the ways mothers took active roles in
supporting their children’s progress in school. This includes assisting with
homework and communicating with the teacher when difficulties arose. All ten
mothers engaged in this sort of activity, but to differing degrees and in
different forms and were able to monitor children’s
65
progress in school, whether
through the traditional modes of communication (such as volunteering in a
child’s classroom, notes between the teacher and parent, or report cards) or
alternative avenues to check up on a child’s progress.
Another finding that needs to be
mentioned here is their active involvement in Parent Teachers Association
(PTAs) which may be referred to as involvement in children’s schooling. The ten
mothers interviewed have an active presence in the school through volunteering
and attending school functions especially during PTA meetings. We also
identified significant challenges that parents faced with respect to being
involved in the literacy education of their children. These include confusion
in teaching the right spelling and pronunciation to their children by some
unqualified teachers, work schedule, lack of time, taking care of other
children, a dearth of reference books and how to help with their children’s
homework when it becomes difficult.
Conclusion and Recommendations
This research was carried out to
examine the ways mothers acted as intellectual resources in their children’s
literacy education. The findings revealed that these mothers acted as advocates
for their children and created opportunities for their children to be literate
through every day realistic situations for learning, even though some of their
activities are not actually seen as school parental involvement based on some
of the literature on parental involvement.
Parents are already making significant
contributions to their children’s development. It is the responsibility of
schools to help parents expand upon what they are already doing. We therefore
challenge administrators, educators and families to make education a genuine
community enterprise. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended
that further research be carried out to understand the knowledge parents draw
on in undertaking this work and to consider ways that the work of parents can
supported within schools. It would also be useful to survey student learning
outcomes based on two study groups – one of parents who are involved in their
children’s education and those who are not. This would allow for some
clarification on the efficacy of parental involvement on student learning
outcomes.
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