Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers With a Special Focus on Immigrant Latino Families

Trumbull, Elise

Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers is intended to stimulate broad thinking about how to meet the challenges of education in a pluralistic society. It is a powerful resource for in-service and preservice multicultural education and professional development. The Guide presents a framework for understanding differences and conflicts that arise in situations where school culture is more individualistic than the value system of the home. It shares what researchers and teachers of the Bridging Cultures Project have learned from the experimentation of teacher-researchers in their own classrooms of largely immigrant Latino students and explores other research on promoting improved home-school relationships across cultures. The framework leads to specific suggestions for supporting teachers to cross-cultural communication; organization parent-teacher conferences that work; use strategies that increase parent involvement in schooling; increase their skills as researchers; and employ ethnographic techniques to learn about home cultures. Although the research underlying the Bridging Cultures Project and this Guide focuses on immigrant Latino families, since this is the primary population with which the framework was originally used, it is a potent tool for learning about other cultures as well because many face similar discrepancies between their own more collectivistic approaches to childrearing and schooling and the more individualistic approach of the dominant culture.

Bridging Cultures Between Home and School: A Guide for Teachers

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

WestEd

Assessment Alternatives for Diverse Classrooms

Farr, Beverly P.

Christopher-Gordon Pub

Bridging Cultures in Early Care and Education

Bridging Cultures in Early Care and Education: A Training Module is a resource designed to help pre-service and in-service early childhood educators, including infant-toddler caregivers, understand the role of culture in their programs. It is also intended for professionals who work with children and their families in a variety of other roles, such as social workers, special educators, and early interventionists, and for use in college courses focused on early childhood education and child development.The module explains and illustrates how early childhood educators can use the organizing concepts of individualism and collectivism as a means of understanding cultural conflict and difference. These concepts have been shown to be highly useful in improving home-school understanding across cultures. Based on real-life examples of cultural dilemmas in early care and education settings, participants engage the concepts of individualism and collectivism to solve a variety of scenarios in a dynamic and engaging manner.*Chapter 1 introduces the Bridging Cultures for Early Care and Education approach, provides a brief history, and explains the training module. It presents the conceptual framework of individualism and collectivism, which is at the heart of the training.*Chapter 2 provides the information needed for a two-hour workshop, including a script and notes to the facilitator. The script is not meant to be read word for word. Rather, it is offered as a guide, based on a pilot-tested approach. Appendices at the end of the book contain transparency masters for the overheads referenced in the script, and masters for suggested handouts.*Chapter 3 offers ideas for augmenting the basic two-hour training by expanding it over a longer time period. It also identifies additional diversity resources that can complement the Bridging Cultures training.*Appendices providing additional information, data, and bibliographic resources are included. This module originated as part of the Bridging Cultures Project at WestEd--a nonprofit research, development, and service agency working with education and other communities to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults.

Parenting & Relationships

Rothstein-Fisch, Carrie

Gonzalez-Mena,Janet

Zepeda, Marlene

Reference

Routledge

Greenfield, Patricia M.

Quiroz, Blanca

How does the home culture of Latino immigrant students differ from the mainstream culture of U.S. schools? Why is it important for teachers to understand the differences? How can educators take advantage of students cultural traits to improve classroom management, student performance, and school-parent relations? Carrie Rothstein-Fisch and Elise Trumbull answer these and many other questions by drawing on the experience and collective wisdom of teachers in the Bridging Cultures Project, a five-year action research study of elementary classrooms with high percentages of immigrant students. The authors present a simple framework for understanding cultural differences, comparing the individualistic culture that prevails in American education with the collectivistic culture that characterizes most of the world s population, including many of the Latino immigrant students in U.S. classrooms. At the heart of the book are teacher-developed strategies that capitalize on the cultural values that these students and their families offer, such as an emphasis on helping, sharing, and the success of the group. The strategies cover a wide spectrum of issues and concerns, including * Communication with families * Open house and parent-teacher conferences * Homework * Attendance * Learning in the content areas * Motivation and rewards * Classroom rules * Assessment and grading Managing Diverse Classrooms: How to Build on Students Cultural Strengths presents both the research foundation and the practical perspectives of seasoned teachers whose classroom-tested approaches have produced positive results. With this valuable guide in hand, readers will have the insights and strategies they need to turn educational challenges into educational opportunities.

Managing Diverse Classrooms: How to Build on Students' Cultural Strengths

ASCD

Learn more about language issues - like how a second language is learned, what the relationship is between oral proficiency and literacy, and how to treat dialect differences that appear in student's writing or speaking. This guide is illustrated with examples from a wide range of grade levels and settings that are relevant for all teachers. Each chapter takes a major topic and presents the critical content within that topic. The authors point out implications for practice, suggest teacher research activities to germinate into personal inquiry, collaborative research, or professional development, and include additional text boxes (Teacher Notes) offering illustrations or expansions of important instructional concepts or ideas. There are also lists of recommended readings at the end of each chapter.

Language and Learning: What Teachers Need to Know

Farr, Beverly

Christopher-Gordon Publishers, Inc.

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