An international research project led by ASU professors and graduate students is employing a new method to gauge the quality of early childhood education for immigrant families in five countries.
For the project, Children Crossing Borders, researchers make videotapes of typical days in preschool classrooms from each participating nation — England, France, Germany, Italy and the U.S. They then show the tapes to the parents of the class’s immigrant children and their teachers to provoke dialogue on how to create the best academic environment within their new culture.
Joseph Tobin, the project’s leader and an early childhood education professor at ASU, said he invented the research technique about 20 years ago out of his interest in how culture and early childhood education are connected. He said by using the videotapes as visual cues rather than as data, the method acts as a catalyst for conversation between teachers and parents by forcing specific responses to what they see on film.
Children tend to perform better in school when their parents are involved, he said, so one of his project’s main goals is to give immigrant parents more information and more opportunity to provide their input in how their children are being taught.
“The idea is if both teachers and parents watch the videotape [together], they will see what they agree and disagree upon,” he said.
He said Children Crossing Borders also focuses on immigrant families because preschools are often an important first site for cultural instruction.
“It’s difficult to come to a new culture and learn to live in this new culture,” he said. “Preschool can be a place where not just the children adjust, but the family, also.”
By expanding the research across five different nations, the project gains a broader perspective about how teachers and immigrant parents currently interact, said Fikriye Kurban, the primary investigator for the project who coordinates the efforts between its participating countries.
“It gives educators a sense of self-reflection about what they’re doing,” she said.
Kurban, an early childhood education graduate student at ASU, said teachers need to be receptive to how other nations address early childhood education and to what parents want for their children, especially immigrant parents who are often unable or too intimidated to speak up.
“It opens [the teachers’] minds to other approaches,” she said. “To me, that is the most educational part of the research.”
One surprising finding in the project’s research, Kurban said, is that immigrant parents often want their new country’s dominant language used to teach their children in school rather than bilingual instruction. In the U.S., she said, these parents feel their kids “need to start learning English as soon as possible, because they themselves are suffering from not knowing the language well.”
Tobin agreed that many immigrant parents in America seem to want more direct academic pressure from early childhood education.
“They feel, ‘We’ll handle Spanish, you teach them English,’” he said.
The project’s findings have shown that immigrant parents want the same thing every parent wants, Tobin said — a high-quality education for their children to help them succeed in the culture they live in.
“Immigrant parents don’t make extreme demands,” he said. “They just want their voice to be heard, and to let [their children’s teachers] know that they’re not ignorant.”
Reach the reporter at trabens@asu.edu.
