Parents’ Beliefs and Commitments Towards Formal Education and Participation in Book-Sharing Interactions Amongst Rural Mayan Parents of First Grade Children

Abstract

As Western schooling continues to expand and reach remote communities, it is imperative to understand rural parents’ beliefs about formal education and the ways in which they can support their children’s schooling. Sociodemographic changes in rural communities have been connected to shifts in parents’ cultural values and practices (Greenfield, 2009), and parental participation in the institution of Western schooling has been identified as an important influence in these changes (Chavajay, 2006; LeVine et al, 2003; 2012, Rogoff & Chavajay, 2002; Rogoff et al., 1993). This dissertation contributes to this knowledge base by exploring both schooled and unschooled parents’ beliefs and commitments towards formal education and their participation in a book-sharing interaction in four rural Mayan communities.

In the first study, I used grounded-theory methods to characterize and compare schooled and unschooled parents’ beliefs on the benefits of formal education for their children’s futures and the commitments that they make to support their children’s schooling, paying particular attention to interactions around written language. In the second study, I used cluster analysis to characterize Mayan parents’ book-sharing styles on the basis of the degree to which parents engaged their children as interlocutors in the interaction and of the type of content they emphasized, and to examine differences between schooled and unschooled parents’ book-sharing styles. Both studies were conducted with 30 parents from four Mayan communities in which Western schooling was introduced over the last decades but where there is still wide variation in parents’ schooling levels –making them ideal sites to study the influence of schooling on parental beliefs and practices. Taken together, the two studies provide evidence on cultural change and continuity, and identify parents’ participation in Western school as an important influence on parent-child interactions while also calling attention to the role of other parental experiences in shaping their beliefs and practices.