Dear Phillip,
I'm glad you took me up on my little note, although my heart starting beating
faster when you focused on my syntax.
The point I was making is that there is an active debate and at times conflict
in the afterschool context in which I work. And that is parents demanding
programs attend to homework, with program staff wanting to do other, more
creative activities such as theater, community projects, and a large range of
other things (see my agency's website, www.pasesetter.com and take a look at
some of our back newsletters for descriptions of the kinds of things that do
and can go on at programs).
Now, to some extent the conflict is fueled by parents buying into the false
notion that they aren't teachers, don't have much to offer. In my experience
as an adult literacy teacher and, eventually running a program, I did see
parents unable, because of their language or literacy level, to help their
kids with schoolwork. But that didn't stop them insisting that their kids sit
down after dinner and do it, or breath down the backs of afterschool programs
to help their kids if they couldn't do algebra themselves. They just fought
harder to get their kids an education. In fact, many, if not most of my
students' kids graduated high school or went to college. So that cycle of
illiteracy notion, I believe, is full of shit. Sorry, but I don't know of
research to back up this visceral response.
But, I don't see that as the main issue underlying this pressure on
afterschool
programs. I see it as a labor issue. When parents are working full time, they
just don't have time to come home, start the dinner, wash up the kids and put
them to bed and, in between, sit with them for an hour to do schoolwork. This
is what we've heard again and again from parents. Schools are singularly not
structured to support working families. This hits me on my head as a single
parent when I wonder what to do with my six year old son who has to be at
school at 8:40 and I have to be on the train platform at 7:50 to get to work.
One thing that interests me more is how to prepare parents to take on issues
around the education of their kids. A project I've been recently working on is
a parent organizing project in collaboration with an agency that has done good
work in community organizing, and is now expanding to afterschool programs at
community based organizations. We're working with a group of parents and
community residents,providing an eight session training and a year of on-site
technical assistance, the end goal being to prepare participants to advocate
for improved education for their children at local schools. This is the second
year with a whole new group of parents. It's quite an exciting project that,
if you're interested, I'd be happy to share more about.
Sara
>===== Original Message From phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz =====
>My concern about after-school homework centres (also being picked up
>as an idea here in NZ) is around the question of the social
>construction of what counts as useful knowledge.
>
>For me schooling is only a subset of education. One of the great
>deadening forces involved in institutionalised public education is
>the tacit redefinition of what happens in the home as being not
>'education', especially if that home is inhabited by people who are
>perceived as having cognitive deficits.
>
>Parents have increasingly come to believe that if they are unable to
>contribute to 'schooling', for whatever reason, they are therefore
unable
>to contribute to 'education'. It is scarcely surprising that those
>who are concerned about their children but believe themselves to have
>a functional deficit as educators of them begin to make
>demands for the deficit to be corrected by further institutional
>interventions such as after school homework centres.
>
>But in my view the after school homework centre response merely
>treats the symptoms and compounds the problem. We reduce the
>time, and therefore the opportunity, for parent-child zopeds to form
>and be nurtured. Not only that, we also further entrench the
>redefinition of what constitutes education as being whatever the
>education authorities say it is. Consider the syntax of Sara Hills
>sentence in her posting which was 'They [parents] want their children
>prepared nevertheless." Sara's syntax is perfectly descriptive. But
>it made me weep (literally - tears sprang to my eyes when I saw that
>sentence - becasue, for me, it elegantly encapsulates a perception of
child raising
>in western societies which is bleak, impoverished and destructive)
>
>For the past year we have been working with a group of schools whose
>intakes come from a NZ community whose formal description dubs it
>to be one where home deficits in the capacity to contribute to
>'education' are amongst the highest in the country. Yet these schools
>have rejected the foregoing assumptions.
>
>Instead they are affirming that what constitutes useful knowledge is
something to
be
>co-constructed between schools and homes (rather than between schools
and
the
>administrators who 'serve' the elected representatives of parents),
>and that once that co-construction has taken place one of the
>responsibilities of the schools is to assist parents to learn
>strategies appropriate to their personal circumstances by which they
>can better form zopeds within their own homes which complement and
>collaborate with the contribution of the schools (rather than to be
>better able to make their children 'school ready' or 'better
>prepared').
>
>One very clear early point is that many parents give up on seeing
>themselves as being active participants in the education of their
>children because, having ceded the rights of description and
>definition to the school system, they are then asked to 'support' the
>school in ways which they cannot, given their skills and/or
>circumstances. Of course, if they are then asked what they need from
>the system by way of support, they respond with demands for after
>school centres and the like.
>
>If, instead, useful knowledge is clearly defined as
>something that is found everywhere (in the fridge, in the VCR
>controls, in the family rottweiler) and education is redefined as
almost
>anything that you experience and reflect on while awake, and that
>these things are defined as phenomena that are part of an integrated
>experience of which the school is part, then huge new potential
>educational resources are discovered, and institutionally
>infantalised parents can catch a glimpse of themselves as functional
>adults.
>
>I acknowledge that the foregoing is an idealistic statement of
>perfection. There is no proof yet that this will work. No chance to
>prove it yet - the project has so far been one of scoping, planning
>and bidding for funding. Only now is it about to become operational.
>The barriers are huge. The project confronts deep seated century old
>cultural assumptions about education, knowledge and the functions of
>schools as institutions, with some teachers providing as many
attitudinal
>challenges as the most alienated and hostile parents. But in
>exploring and mapping the territory, and discussing the idea widely
>in the community, there have already been just enough magical little
>vignettes to instill a sense of excitement and hope into this project
which is
>greater than almost anything else I have experienced.
>Phillip Capper
>Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business (WEB Research)
>PO Box 2855
>9th Floor 142 Featherston Street
>Wellington
>New Zealand
>
>Phone: (64) 04 499 8140
>Mobile: 021 251 9741
>Fx: (64) 04 499 8395
>
>phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz
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