97 48p. (Baltimore) - files.eric.ed.gov · DOCUMENT RESUME ED 405 568 CS 012 756 AUTHOR Serpell,...

DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 405 568 CS 012 756

AUTHOR Serpell, Robert; And OthersTITLE Parental Ideas about Development and Socialization of

Children on the Threshold of Schooling. ReadingResearch Report No. 78.

INSTITUTION National Reading Research Center, Athens, GA.;National Reading Research Center, College Park,MD

SPONS AGENCY Office of Educational Research and Improvement (ED),Washington, DC.

PUB DATE 97CONTRACT 117A20007NOTE 48p.

PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Developmental Stages; Early Childhood Education;

*Literacy; *Parent Attitudes; Parent TeacherCooperation; Reading Research; School Readiness;*Socialization; Sociocultural Patterns; SocioeconomicStatus

IDENTIFIERS Baltimore City Public Schools MD; Maryland(Baltimore)

ABSTRACTA study analyzed ideas expressed by 38 parents of 4-

to 5-year-old children about their socialization goals and the bestways of helping their child to attain them, with special attention tothe domain of literacy. All the participating families had a childenrolled in kindergarten or first grade, all included an older child,and all were residents of Baltimore, Maryland. Parental goals,elicited through interviews and diaries, ranged widely and more oftenemphasized the moral/social and personal domains of development thanintellectual and academic skills. Both the domain of developmentconsidered and the sociocultural background of the family influencedparents' preferred approach to socialization. Proactive interventionstrategies (such as deliberate instruction) were more often cited forthe domain of literacy than for moral development and were more oftencited for the cultivation of literacy by low-income parents, whereasmiddle-income parents more often preferred a strategy of reliance onthe child's experience. Preference for proactive intervention wasrelated to an emphasis on the cultural theme of literacy as a set ofskills to be acquired, while reliance on experience was related tothe theme of literacy as a source of entertainment. Parentsattributed greater responsibility to the school relative to the homefor the socialization of children's literacy than for their moraldevelopment. Idiographic profiles of selected parents' ideas aboutthese various issues are represented as illustrations of caregiverethnotheories, and the implication are discussed for cooperativecommunication between parents and teachers about children's earlyintroduction to literacy. (Contains 52 references and 7 tables ofdata. An appendix presents interview questions.) (Author/RS)

Parental Ideas About Developmentand Socialization of Children onthe Threshold of Schooling

Robert SerpellSusan SonnenscheinLinda BakerSusan HillVictoria Goddard-TruittEvangeline DansecoUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County

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NationalReading ResearchCenter

READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 78

Winter 1997

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NRRCNational Reading Research Center

Parental Ideas About Development and Socializationof Children on the Threshold of Schooling

Robert SerpellSusan Sonnenschein

Linda BakerSusan Hill

Victoria Goddard-TruittEvangeline Danseco

University of Maryland Baltimore County

READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 78Winter 1997

The work reported herein is a National Reading Research Center Project of the Universityof Georgia and University of Maryland. It was supported under the Educational Research andDevelopment Centers Program (PR/AWARD NO. 117A20007) as administered by the Officeof Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. The fmdings andopinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the position or policies of the NationalReading Research Center, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the U.S.Department of Education.

3

NRRC NationalReading ResearchCenter

Executive CommitteeDonna E. Alvermann, Co-DirectorUniversity of Georgia

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James V. HoffmanUniversity of Texas at Austin

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Robert SerpellUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County

Betty Shockley-BisplinghoffClarke County School District, Athens, Georgia

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Publications Editors

Research Reports and PerspectivesLinda DeGroff, EditorUniversity of Georgia

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NRRC - University of Georgia318 AderholdUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, Georgia 30602-7125(706) 542-3674 Fax: (706) 542-3678INTERNET: NRRC(Ouga.cc.uga.edu

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About the National Reading Research Center

The National Reading Research Center (NRRC) isfunded by the Office of Educational Research andImprovement of the U.S. Department of Education toconduct research on reading and reading instruction.The NRRC is operated by a consortium of the Univer-sity of Georgia and the University of Maryland CollegePark in collaboration with researchers at several institu-tions nationwide.

The NRRC's mission is to discover and documentthose conditions in homes, schools, and communitiesthat encourage children to become skilled, enthusiastic,lifelong readers. NRRC researchers are committed toadvancing the development of instructional programssensitive to the cognitive, sociocultural, and motiva-tional factors that affect children's success in reading.NRRC researchers from a variety of disciplines conductstudies with teachers and students from widely diversecultural and socioeconomic backgrounds in pre-kinder-garten through grade 12 classrooms. Research projectsdeal with the influence of family and family-schoolinteractions on the development of literacy; the interac-tion of sociocultural factors and motivation to read; theimpact of literature-based reading programs on readingachievement; the effects of reading strategies instructionon comprehension and critical thinking in literature,science, and history; the influence of innovative groupparticipation structures on motivation and learning; thepotential of computer technology to enhance literacy;and the development of methods and standards foralternative literacy assessments.

The NRRC is further committed to the participationof teachers as full partners in its research. A betterunderstanding of how teachers view the development ofliteracy, how they use knowledge from research, andhow they approach change in the classroom is crucial toimproving instruction. To further this understanding,the NRRC conducts school-based research in whichteachers explore their own philosophical and pedagogi-cal orientations and trace their professional growth.

Dissemination is an important feature of NRRCactivities. Information on NRRC research appears inseveral formats. Research Reports communicate theresults of original research or synthesize the findings ofseveral lines of inquiry. They are written primarily forresearchers studying various areas of reading andreading instruction. The Perspective Series presents awide range of publications, from calls for research andcommentary on research and practice to first-personaccounts of experiences in schools. InstructionalResources include curriculum materials, instructionalguides, and materials for professional growth, designedprimarily for teachers.

For more information about the NRRC's researchprojects and other activities, or to have your nameadded to the mailing list, please contact:

Donna E. Alvermann, Co-DirectorNational Reading Research Center318 Aderhold HallUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, GA 30602-7125(706) 542-3674

John T. Guthrie, Co-DirectorNational Reading Research Center3216 J. M. Patterson BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742(301) 405-8035

NRRC Editorial Review Board

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Minnesota

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Ann Dacey McCannUniversity of Maryland College Park

Sarah McCartheyUniversity of Texas at Austin

Veda McClainUniversity of Georgia

Lisa McFallsUniversity of Georgia

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Mike McKennaGeorgia Southern University

Barbara MichaloveFourth Street Elementary School

Athens, Georgia

Elizabeth B. MojeUniversity of Utah

Lesley MorrowRutgers University

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Susan NeumanTemple University

John O'FlahavanUniversity of Maryland College Park

Marilyn Ohlhausen-McKinneyUniversity of Nevada

Penny OldfatherUniversity of Georgia

Barbara M. PalmerMount Saint Mary's College

Stephen PhelpsBuffalo State College

Mike PickleGeorgia Southern University

Amber T. PrinceBerry College

Gaoyin QianLehman College-CUNY

Tom ReevesUniversity of Georgia

Lenore RinglerNew York University

Mary RoeUniversity of Delaware

Nadeen T. RuizCalifornia State University-

Sacramento

Olivia SarachoUniversity of Maryland College Park

Paula SchwanenflugelUniversity of Georgia

Robert SerpellUniversity of Maryland Baltimore

County

Betty Shockley-BisplinghoffBarnett Shoals Elementary School

Athens, Georgia

Wayne H. SlaterUniversity of Maryland College Park

Margaret SmithLas Vegas, Nevada

Susan SonnenscheinUniversity of Maryland Baltimore

County

Bernard SpodekUniversity of Illinois

Bettie St. PierreUniversity of Georgia

Steve StahlUniversity of Georgia

Roger StewartBoise State University

Anne P. SweetOffice of Educational Research

and Improvement

Louise TomlinsonUniversity of Georgia

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Louise WaynantPrince George's County Schools

Upper Marlboro, Maryland

Dera WeaverAthens Academy

Athens, Georgia

Jane WestAgnes Scott College

Renee WeisburgElkins Park, Pennsylvania

Allan WigfieldUniversity of Maryland College Park

Shelley WongUniversity of Maryland College Park

Josephine Peyton YoungUniversity of Georgia

Hanle YoppCalifornia State University

About the Authors

Robert Serpell is a Professor and Director ofApplied Developmental Psychology at the Univer-sity of Maryland Baltimore County. Born andraised in England, he received his doctorate fromthe University of Sussex. Dr. Serpell worked atthe University of Zambia from 1965 to 1989 andis a naturalized citizen of Zambia. His researchand publications have focused on socioculturalfactors in cognitive development, including Cul-ture' influence on behavior (Methuen, 1976), Thesignificance of schooling (Cambridge, 1993), anda chapter with Giyoo Hatano on "Education,schooling and literacy" in the Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology (Allyn & Bacon, 1996). Dr.Serpell and his co-authors may be contacted at theDepartment of Psychology, University of Mary-land Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle,Baltimore, MD 21250.

Susan Sonnenschein is an associate Professor inthe Applied Developmental Psychology Programat the University of Maryland Baltimore County.She has conducted research in children's languagedevelopment. She also has explored how parentalbeliefs and practices affect children's cognitivedevelopment. She is currently one of the principalinvestigators, along with Linda Baker and RobertSerpell, int he Early Childhood Project, a longitu-dinal project investigating the development ofliteracy for children from different socioculturalbackgrounds.

Linda Baker is a Professor of Psychology at theUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County and aprincipal investigator at the National ReadingResearch Center. She received her Ph.D. fromRutgers University. Her current research focuseson the social and cultural contexts of children'searly literacy development. She is also interested

in the development of metacognition and compre-hension monitoring.

Susan Hill is a graduate student in the AppliedDevelopmental Psychology doctoral program at theUniversity of Maryland Baltimore County. Hermasters' thesis analyzed oral narratives by pre-kindergarten children participating in the EarlyChildhood Project. She is currently employed bythe School Mental Health Program of the Univer-sity of Maryland at Baltimore.

Victoria Goddard-Truitt received her Ph.D. in1996 from the Department of Human Developmentat the University of Maryland College Park. Herresearch interests are related to the social andcultural contexts of child development. her doctor-al dissertation examines parents' beliefs aboutchildren's communicative competencies.

Evangeline R. Danseco is a graduate student inthe Applied Development Psychology doctoralprogram at the University of Maryland BaltimoreCounty. She is currently working in a project atthe University of Maryland School of Social Workimplementing and evaluating programs for theprevention of child abuse and neglect. Her disser-tation examines ethnotheories among parents andteachers of children in regular and special educa-tion classes.

National Reading Research CenterUniversities of Georgia and MarylandReading Research Report No. 78Winter 1997

Parental Ideas About Development and Socialicationof Children on the Threshold of Schooling

Robert SerpellSusan Sonnenschein

Linda BakerSusan Hill

Victoria Goddard-TruittEvangeline Danseco

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Abstract. This report presents an analysis of ideasexpressed by parents of 4 to 5 year-old childrenabout their socialization goals and the best ways ofhelping their child to attain them, with specialattention to the domain of literacy. All the partici-pating families had a child enrolled in kindergartenor first grade, all included an older child, and allwere residents of Baltimore City. Parental goals,elicited with an innovative method, ranged widelyand more often emphasized the moral/social andpersonal domains of development than intellectualand academic skills. Both the domain of develop-ment considered and the sociocultural backgroundof the family influenced parents' preferred approachto socialization. Proactive intervention strategies(such as deliberate instruction) were more oftencited for the domain of literacy than for moraldevelopment and were more often cited for thecultivation of literacy by low-income parents,whereas middle-income parents more often preferreda strategy of relizane on the child's experience.Preference for proactive intervention was related toan emphasis on the cultural theme of literacy as aset of skills to be acquired, while reliance on experi-

1

ence was related to the theme of literacy as a sourceof entertainment. Parents attributed greater respon-sibility to the school relative to the home for thesocialization of children's literacy than for theirmoral development. Idiographic profiles of selectedparents' ideas abou these various issues are present-ed as illustrations of caregiver thnotheories, and theimplications are discussed forcooperative communi-cation between parents and teachers about chil-dren's early introduction to literacy.

The Early Childhood Project in Baltimore isan attempt to understand, in several contrastivesociocultural groups, the interactive processesthrough which children explore and graduallyappropriate cultural resources in the environ-ment, including the practices and technology ofliteracy. Our guiding hypotheses are as fol-lows: (1) distinctive patterns of socializationpractices can. be identified in the home environ-ments of children being raised as members ofdifferent sociocultural groups; (2) those dis-tinctive patterns are reflected in differentimplicit theories of child development and

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2 Serpell, Sonnenschein, Baker, Hill, Goddard-Truitt, & Danseco

parental responsibility among the children'sprimary caregivers; (3) a major source ofvariation in the patterns of school performanceby children of different sociocultural groups isthe variable degree to which the socializationpractices and associated beliefs of their homeenvironment match the developmental pathwaydefined by the curriculum of public elementaryschools.

The interaction between child developmentand its context has been treated in various waysby different theorists (Serpell, 1993b). One setof perspectives conceptualizes context as exter-nal stimulation that shapes behavior (Skinner,1953), affords action possibilities (Gibson,1982), calls for adaptation (Piaget, 1971), orprovides information (Sternberg, 1984). Anoth-er, more complex, type of perspective con-strues context as an incorporating system ofsocial activity (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Lave &Wenger, 1991), informed by a system ofcultural meanings (D'Andrade, 1984; Shweder,1990). A combination of these various theoreti-cal insights is offered by the notion of a devel-opmental niche (Super & Harkness, 1986), oreco-cultural niche of development (Gallimore,Weisner, Kaufmann, & Bernheimer, 1989),which embraces the dimensions of externalstimulation, social activity, and cultural mean-ing. Super and Harkness (1986), for instance,distinguish three types of interrelated structure:physical and social settings, customs of childcare, and the implicit psychology shared bycaregivers.

In this project, we have sought to documentall three of these dimensions through an eco-

logical inventory of recurrent activities in thechild's everyday home experience as well asthose more formally structured by schools,through reports by parents of their child-rear-ing practices and by teachers of their methodsof instruction, and through reflective discus-sions with parents and teachers concerningtheir implicit theories of child development andsocialization.

In one of our earlier reports on the project,we focused on variations in approach to litera-cy socialization reflected in the range of recur-rent, home-based activities in which the chil-dren of our sample participated during theirprekindergarten year (Baker, Sonnenschein,Serpell, Fernandez-Fein, & Scher, 1994). Suchactivities constitute one dimension of the cul-tural practices (Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel,1995) that characterize the niche. They weredescribed to us by each participating child'sprimary caregiver in two ways: a "diary" keptfor a one-week period at our request, and an"ecological inventory" elicited in a follow-upinterview conducted during a visit to thechild's home. Our analysis of those data led usto identify three cultural themes invoked in thecaregivers' descriptions: that literacy is asource of entertainment, that literacy consistsof a set of skills to be acquired, and that litera-cy is an integral feature of everyday life. Themiddle- income families in our sample moreoften reported activities consistent with thetheme of literacy as a source of entertainment,and the low-income families more often report-ed activities consistent with the theme of litera-cy as a set of skills to be acquired.

A second report analyzed the relation be-tween the degree of emphasis placed on these

NATIONAL READING RESEARCH CENTER, READING RESEARCH REPORT NO. 78

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Parental Ideas About Development and Socialization 3

different cultural themes in a child's develop-mental niche and the emergence of variousstrands of literacy-related competence (Sonnen-schein, Baker, Serpell, Fernandez-Fein, Scher,& Munsterman, 1996). For both low-incomeand middle-income families, we found that anentertainment-oriented approach was morepredictive of certain early competencies than askills-oriented approach. Our index of orienta-tion toward these two themes was a compositescore based on the number of different types ofprint-related activities reported in the diariesand on the caregiver's answers to an interviewquestion about the most effective way to helptheir child learn to read and write. Emergentcompetencies were assessed with a battery oftests administered individually at the child'sschool, focusing on narrative production,phonological awareness, and knowledge aboutprint. The degree of emphasis in the home onliteracy as a source of entertainment was signif-icantly and positively related to the child'sphonological awareness (during prekindergar-ten), knowledge about print (during both pre-kindergarten and kindergarten), and narrativecompetence (during kindergarten). In all cases(even when the correlation failed to reachsignificance), the correlations between scoreson the entertainment orientation index andscores on the three strands of literacy-relatedcompetence were positive.

In the present report, we take up the docu-mentation of the third dimension of the niche:the implicit cultural models of child develop-ment and socialization held by those responsi-ble for child care and child-rearing, that is,"caregiver ethnotheories" (Serpell, Baker,Sonnenschein, & Hill, 1991). We present an

analysis of the ideas expressed to us by parentsduring two extensive interviews that were de-signed to build on and expand the insightsgained from the diary and the ecological inven-tory.

Our methodological orientation seeks tosynthesize the complementary contributions ofquantitative measurement and analysis withthose of qualitative description and interpreta-tion. In this paper, we weave together thesetwo different modes of documentation as weexplore the relations among several psycholog-ical and cultural constructs and variables. Webegin with a selective review of previousresearch.

Parental Ethnotheories

The cultural context of child developmentconstitutes both a set of constraints to which achild must adapt and a conceptual frameworkfor interpreting developmental change. Thetheoretical shift from conceiving context asexternal stimulation to conceiving it as anincorporating system of social activity andcultural meanings has methodological implica-tions. Rather than describing the behavior of acaregiver as an external causal influence on thedevelopment of a child, researchers can learnmore from engaging him or her in interpretivediscussion of the hopes and fears, goals andbeliefs that inform his or her interactions withthe child. Such hermeneutical discussion ac-knowledges the responsibility of researchers,parents, and teachers to co-construct, or nego-tiate, a shared understanding of possibilities forthe enhancement of children's developmentalopportunities (Serpell, 1994).



The study of ethnotheories has a muchlonger history in anthropology than in psychol-ogy, and the literature is rich with hypothesesabout how culture informs this aspect of thedevelopmental niche. Standard ethnographictechniques, however, while generating evoca-tive accounts of culturally distinctive systemsof ideas, "fail to make clear exactly whatindividual natives really believe, since thesestudies focus primarily on collective represen-tations of various kinds, such as myth andritual" (D'Andrade, 1990, p. 108; see alsoJahoda, 1982). Within psychology, on theother hand, research on parental beliefs hasoften been guided by little or no theory, givingrise to isolated investigations of unrelatedbeliefs rather than more programmatic research(Goodnow, 1988; S. Miller, 1988). As a con-sequence, the origins of the beliefs and theprocesses controlling the relationship betweenbeliefs and behavior remain poorly understood,and many of the results reported seem scarcelyapplicable to real people and situations.

Two recent reviews have identified trendsand gaps in the literature about parental ideas.Miller (1988) suggested that future research inthis area should pay special attention to study-ing parents' actual beliefs as opposed to thebeliefs that psychologists think they shouldhave, to studying beliefs comparatively, toconducting longitudinal studies of how beliefsdevelop and change, and to conducting morecultural comparisons but "measuring differ-ences in experience directly rather than infer-ring differences from group membership"(p. 281). Goodnow and Collins (1990) notedthat both individual and cultural variations havebeen documented with respect to parents'

goals, their conceptions of the initial nature ofchildren, their conceptions of the course ofdevelopment (its stages, how they are linked,the timetable of developmental change), of thecontributions of heredity and environment,and, in particular, of their responsibilities ascaregivers and agents of socialization. Theystressed the need for further research on theprocesses involved in the change of an individ-ual parent's ideas over time and the value offocusing such research on major developmentaltransitions, where "the changes in children arehighly visible, and the implications of thechange are likely to be significant to bothparents and children and to the relationshipbetween them."

Our reading of the psychological literaturesuggests two additional problems in ascertain-ing parental beliefs. One is that parents mayhave many different beliefs about their childrenand these beliefs may not always be readilyavailable for conscious reflection. For exam-ple, Rodrigo and Triana (1996) present intrigu-ing empirical evidence regarding how thevarious components of a belief system arerepresented in memory and how they aredeployed in making practical judgments andformulating expectations of behavior. They arecritical of the notion that ethnotheoretical, laybeliefs about child development and socializa-tion are represented in an individual's memoryin the form of structurally organized schemasand conclude that it is the "structure of infor-mation presented" that is crucial for the elabo-ration of inferences about actions.

In our work, the respondent's attention hasbeen focused on a particular child for whomshe or he is the primary caregiver, beginning


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with a descriptive account of recurrent activi-ties in the child's everyday life in the homeenvironment, and gradually expanding throughan interpretive discussion of those activitiestoward more abstract expression of the care-givers' principal hopes and expectations for thechild's future development, and of her beliefsabout how those and other desirable outcomescan best be promoted.

One type of explanatory schema of particu-lar interest to us is the notion of a developmen-tal goal for the child, toward which the parentconstrues her socialization practices as orient-ed. We recognize that there may be consider-able variation among parents in how deliberate-ly their practices are focused on molding ornurturing a certain direction of development.Hallden (1991), for instance, reports that twocontrasting themes coexisted for many of thecontemporary Swedish parents she interviewed:an Aristotelian concept of "the child as being"whose development is a natural process direct-ed by inner drives and for whom parentsshould be available as a resource, and analternative concept of "the child as project"whose development the parent should activelystrive to influence by serving as an introduceror mediator. Parents may invoke either of thesecontrasting models, both of which are wellrepresented in the public domain of contempo-rary Swedish culture, "in order to understandand come to grips with various problems" (p.339) that arise in the context of caregiving.Nevertheless, we suppose that a quality ofdirectionality is intrinsic to most people'sconception of child development, and regardthe emphasis that we placed in our interviewson this topic as logically essential to the ensu-

ing discussions that we planned about theprocess of education.

A second problem, which has not beenadequately tackled in current research, arisesfrom what appear to be formally incompatiblebeliefs or beliefs that are incompatible withpractices. For example, several researchershave asked parents of children attending Amer-ican schools about their perceptions of thesignificance of schooling (Stevenson et al.,1990; Laosa, 1984; Okagaki & Sternberg,1991). In all of these studies, low-incomeparents of minority culture groups tended toendorse academic goals even more highly thanmiddle-class, mainstream groups. Yet thepattern of academic achievement of those low-income minority group children is relativelyweak, and in some cases the young people goon to express a countercultural disenchantmentwith the mainstream culture as it is presentedin the schools (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu,1990). We suspect that this seeming discrepan-cy between beliefs and behaviors may be moreapparent than real. There may be severalreasons for this pattern of findings. The alien-ation may arise from experiences of children inthe elementary school, subverting an initiallypositive orientation (Snow et al., 1991). Par-ents may send their children double messages(Ogbu, 1990). Parents may have more than onegoal for their child and these goals may beweighted differently, with the most highlyweighted goals (not necessarily those tapped bythe researcher) getting the most attention. Inaddition, parents of minority cultural groupsand/or economically oppressed social groupsmay tend to exaggerate the degree to whichthey agree with the philosophy that informs the


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school system. This may occur partly out ofhopeful optimism that things will turn outbetter for their children than they did for them-selves, partly because they do not perceiveclearly the areas in which their personal andcultural orientation differ from that of theschool teachers, and partly because there existsin contemporary American society a strongpublic cultural theme that schooling is a majorroute for upward social mobility. All of thesefactors may create a social desirability responsebias that is difficult for researchers to getbeyond when interviewing parents of lowersocioeconomic status.

Another example of incompatible beliefscomes from the work of Serpell (1977, 1982)in Zambia, who used semi-structured inter-views with caregivers in Chewa villages toexplore adult perceptions of the most valuableattributes of child behavior. Although manyparents endorsed the principle of enrolling theirchildren in school, they apparently had other,more highly valued goals as well. Serpellconcluded that the indigenous formulation ofintellectual development in relation to moraldevelopment and socialization differed inimportant respects from the formal educationalmodel of cognitive growth that informs theprimary school curriculum. This discrepancygenerated grave difficulties for students, par-ents and teachers in integrating the cultures ofhome and school (Serpell, 1993a).

The degree of such discordance between theorthodoxy of public education and the indige-nous ethnotheories of client families is unlikelyto be as great in a society such as the USA,where formal education has been institutional-ized over several generations. But the city in

which our study is situated, like many otherAmerican cities in the 1990s, includes animpoverished center characterized by highrates of adult illiteracy and high school dropout, along with other features of what someauthors have termed a growing urban under-class (e.g., Wilson, 1990). In such communi-ties we expected to find a certain number ofparents with limited, weak, or aversive person-al histories of contact with the school systemand its agenda. The city also contains a fewwealthy neighborhoods and a substantial,middle-income residential zone, where schoolattendance and adult literacy rates are muchhigher. In order to permit valid comparisonsbetween such diverse groups, we considered itmethodologically essential to define the focusof our inquiry broadly enough for the morealienated families not to perceive us as simplyagents of the school. This approach has afford-ed us the substantive advantage of learningabout parents' views concerning emergentliteracy within a wider array of issues confront-ing all parents than has commonly been thecase in literacy research.

Parents in the Early Childhood Project wereasked to report first on their children's behav-iors. We used the reported behaviors as aspringboard for interpretive discussion aboutparental goals and beliefs and how these arerelated to practices. Through open-endedinterviews, we sought to understand the multi-plicity of ideas that parents have about childdevelopment and how these ideas are interrelat-ed. In this report, we examine the goals thatparents of prekindergartners have for theirchildren; we consider parental ideas about howchildren learn to read and write, and how they


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can best be assisted to do so, including therelative responsibilities of the home and school;we compare parents' ideas about literacy devel-opment to their ideas about moral development;and we present several case studies illustratingconsistency in the socialization goals and ideasof individual parents elicited with differentquestions at different times. The contrastingcultural themes about literacy developmentidentified in our earlier work are revisited andfurther elaborated in this paper. While themethods of this investigation are summarized inthe next section, a more detailed account willbe presented elsewhere with a focus on theinnovative contribution that we believe theymake to the methodology of assessment ofcaregiver ethnotheories.

The data reported here were collected fromour sample of caregivers when the children inthe project were in prekindergarten and kinder-garten. As the project continues, we plan toexamine the stability and changes in eachcaregiver's theoretical ideas or models as theirchild progresses through the early years offormal schooling, and the particular ways inwhich those models are related to her observedpattern of interaction with the child. We recog-nize that our use of the term ethnotheory tendsto imply that certain influences on the contentof the individual parent's implicit understand-ing arise from culturally mediated experiencesshared among members of an ethnic group. Infact, however, one of our empirical goals is todetermine the degree to which those parametersare shared among members of ethnic groups,socioeconomic classes, or other classificatory

groupings of caregivers, such as those whoreside in the same or similar neighborhoods.

Method

Participant Families

The sample of families on which this reportis based comprised 38 of the 43 families initial-ly recruited to participate in the first phase ofthe ongoing Early Childhood Project betweenJanuary and June 1993. Families were recruit-ed from among the total enrollment in pre-kindergarten classes at six public elementaryschools in Baltimore serving four contrastivetypes of neighborhood: (1) two ethnicallyhomogeneous, African-American, low-incomeneighborhoods; (2) two ethnically homoge-neous, European-American, low-income neigh-borhoods; (3) one ethnically heterogeneous,low-income neighborhood; and (4) one ethni-cally heterogeneous, middle-income neighbor-hood. Both of the ethnically heterogeneousneighborhoods were populated by an even mixof African-American and European-Americanfamilies. Income levels of the families werecontrolled by recruiting only families thatreceived free or subsidized lunch at the schoolsserving low-income neighborhoods, and ex-cluding any such children from the sample atthe school catering to a middle-income neigh-borhood. Each family included at least oneolder child. Further details of the samplingframe are reported by Baker et al. (1994).

The sample of parents interviewed com-prised 36 mothers and two fathers. Their agesranged from 21 to 43 years, with a mean ageof 30.6 years. Parents' level of education


15


varied within the sample, with 6 parents neverattending high school (16%), 4 parents com-pleting some high school (11%), 17 parentsearning a high school diploma or GED (45%),and 10 parents completing some college orvocational school (26%). The number of boysand girls in the sample (focal children) wasapproximately equal (females = 20, males =17).

Interview Procedures

Overview. Our method involved a series ofsteps through which we engaged the child'sprimary caregiver in conversations about thechild that were grounded in ostensible, recur-rent activities of the child's everyday life:Step 1: identification of recurrent activities(Diary)Step 2: survey of recurrent activities (Ecolog-ical inventory)Step 3: elicitation of caregiver meanings

(First ethnotheoretical interview: Ethno #1)Step 4: (a) specification of a personal hierarchyof child socialization goals;

(b) articulation of beliefs related tothese and other socialization goals (Ethno #2)Step 5: review of goals in relation to those ofother caregivers (Ethno #3).The time period over which these steps weredistributed ranged from 3 to 9 months, with amean of 6.88. At the time of the Ethno #2interview, the mean age of the focal childrenwas 5 years; 0 months (sd 0.34 yrs; range4;3-5;9). Each of the interviews was conductedby a graduate research assistant (RA), accom-panied by an undergraduate student member ofthe research team. The pair assigned to visit agiven family always included at least one

interviewer whose ethnicity superficiallymatched that of the primary caregiver. Appen-dix A includes the complete set of interviewitems and procedures. Given length con-straints, however, we will not address all ofthese elements in the present report. Table 1summarizes only those procedures and ques-tions pertinent to the analyses reported here.

The interview series. The first step in theinterview series was to request the caregiver tokeep a diary of the child's everyday life for aweek, in order to generate an account of theweek's constituent activities phrased in thecaregiver's own preferred vocabulary. Thecaregiver was invited to choose between re-cording her description in writing in a note-book, or dictating it onto a portable cassette-recorder. (See Baker et al., 1994, for furtherdiscussion of the diary procedures.)

The diary was collected and examined forexamples of the following broad categories ofpotentially recurrent activity: games and playactivities; mealtime activities; TV, video, andmusic activities; recurrent outings; and read-ing, writing, or drawing activities. Examplesof each type were transferred verbatim fromthe diary to the interview guide and formed theopening theme of each phase of a structuredinterview that we have entitled the "ecologicalinventory." In this second step, we asked thecaregiver to specify whether there were anyother activities of this type that were recurrentin the child's everyday life. We then probed tofind out whether particular pre-coded subcate-gories of this type of activity occurred and if sowith what frequency and with which co-partici-pants (see Baker et al., 1994, for further detailsabout the Ecological Inventory).


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Table 1Summary of research procedures relevant for this report

Interview Visit Key Questions/Queries

Diary

Eco-inventory/

Ethnotheory 1

Ethnotheory 2

Ethnotheory 3

When making your diary entry, think about the following kinds ofactivities: getting up activities, breakfast activities, morning activities,lunch activities, afternoon activities, dinner activities, evening activities,going to bed. Remember to include: What your child was doing; whatkinds of items were used; who else was there and what were they doing;and how long did the activity go on for.

Pt 1 (Eco): queries related to the frequency, participant structure, andexamples of specific types of activities falling in the broad categories of:game-playing; meal-time activities; recurrent outings; reading, writing,drawing; TV watching, radio, etc.

Pt2 (Ethno): Exploration of the meaning of select activities noted in thediary or mentioned in the Eco-inventory: What does this mean to you?What do you think it means to FC (the focal child)?

In our earlier conversation, you mentioned or hinted at the followingthings you see as important for your child as s/he is growing up. (List ofproposed goals or wishes, wants.) Which of these goals for your child isthe most importnat in your view?

It seems that parents have differing ideas about the most effective way ofhelping a young child to learn (about right and wrong; the physicalworld; to speak and understand language; to read and write; and aboutnumbers), and teachers also do not always agree with one another aboutthis. What do you believe is the most effective way to help your childlearn about some of these things?

I'm going to ask you to tell me now how you feel about the responsibili-ties of the school and the home for each of these parts of the child'slearning. Does one of these two worlds in which the child gains experi-ence have more responsibility than the other, and do they have differentresponsibilities?

Today we would like to ask you to react to some statements by otherparents. I am going to read you a list of various goals that parents inyour neighborhood and in other Baltimore neighborhoods have told usthat they have for their four-year-old child. And for each one Iwould like for you to tell me whether this goal is also important toyou as a parent. I would like you to rate each of these goals on a scalefrom 1 to 5.

Now, before we leave this topic, I'd like to ask you to compare thegoals you rated most highly in each of the three lists. If you had tochoose, which of the goals would you rate as most important of all,which would you rate second most important, and so on.


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The third step (Ethno #1) was conductedimmediately following the ecological inventoryas a continuation of the same interview and wasalso grounded in the vocabulary of the diary.We opened this phase by announcing that wewould like to discuss the caregiver's ideasabout what is most important in the child's lifeat this stage of his or her development and thecaregiver's reasons for considering these thingsimportant. Recapping on the ecological inven-tory, we noted that the child has a number oftoys (mentioning some actual examples),watches TV quite frequently (if applicable),has a number of playmates (friends and/orsiblings, whom we name), and enjoys doing Xwith adult A, and doing Y with child B, draw-ing on the diary and the ecological interviewfor the specification of X, Y, A, and B. Wethen asked the caregiver "to tell us a bit moreabout what these various aspects of your child'slife mean" to the child and to the caregiver.

In order to concretize this conversationalagenda, we told the respondent that parentshave given us a number of explanations forwhy they buy toys for their children and thatwe would like to know the interviewee's opin-ion. Parents have also expressed various viewsabout which children their own child should beallowed to play with, and we requested theinterviewee's opinion on this topic. Likewisewe asked the caregiver to explain to us whatshe feels, given the diversity of parental viewson the matter, about the activity of watchingTV.

Having set the scene in this way for anexpression of personal opinion concerningaspects of their child's everyday life, we pro-ceeded to ask, for a set of at least six, individu-

alized recurrent activities (previously describedby the caregiver in the diary and/or the ecolog-ical inventory):

What do you think this activity means to(the focal child)?

What does it mean to you as her/his parent(caregiver)?

The answers to these questions formed thebasis for step 4 in our investigation of care-giver ethnotheories, which was conducted on asubsequent visit. We reviewed the record ofwhat the caregiver had told us and composedan individualized introduction to the nextinterview (Ethno #2) as follows:

In our earlier conversation, you mentionedor hinted at the following things you see asimportant for your child as she is growing up(followed by a list of at least 3 and up to 7themes cited in steps 1, 2 and/or 3, pausingafter each to clarify, confirm, reformulateinteractively). Which of these goals for

(the focal child) is the most importantin your view? Are there any additional goalsor hopes that you have for (the focalchild)? Where would you place (each ofthese) relative to the other ones we have justdiscussed?

Thus, caregivers provided a set of goals andranked them in order of importance.

Thereafter caregivers were asked a standardset of questions about what they consideredoptimal ways to help their child learn in eachof five domains: learning about right andwrong, learning about the physical world,learning to communicate, learning to read andwrite, and learning about numbers. They werealso asked their opinion about the relativeimportance and complementarity of the contri-


18


butions of home and school to the child'sdevelopment in each of these domains.

In step 5 of the interview series, conductedseveral months after step 4, caregivers werepresented a list of 30 goals extracted from theresponses of all families in the sample (seeTable 2 for a list of these goals). The goalswere divided into three major categories: socialand moral; personal; intellectual and academic.Caregivers were asked to rate the importanceof each of the goals within categories on a scaleof 1 to 5, with 5 representing most importantand 1 representing least important. Then theywere asked to rank order their highest ratedgoals from each of these three categories. Thisprocedure made it possible to examine theconsistency of the importance placed on care-givers' original goals when they were presentedin a different context.

Results

A. Parents' Socialization Goals for TheirChildren

Validity of the technique. Step 4 of theelicitation procedure described above may beregarded as the most constructively hermeneu-tical part of our investigation of caregiverethnotheories. As such, it warrants furtherdiscussion. At a more general level, we believethat the reliability of qualitative analysis needsto be secured by some relatively objectiveindications of the reliability of the proceduresfollowed in arriving at generalizations. Accord-ingly we are presenting elsewhere (Serpell etal., in preparation) what Lincoln and Guba

(1985) refer to as an "audit trail" of our proce-dures, which are summarized below.

Each RA met with one of the principalinvestigators of the project (RS, SS, LB) toreview in detail the caregiver's responses to theEthnotheory #1 interview. Together theyreviewed both the Diary and the Ethnotheory#1 interview for expressions of value by therespondent and inductively derived a set ofimplicit socialization goals that appeared toinform the meanings she had imputed to thevarious recurrent activities in her child's every-day life. These inferred goals were then dis-cussed with the caregiver in a subsequentinterview. As much as possible, we attemptedto word the goals in the respondent's ownwords and to cite examples from the diary andinterview to support our identification. Eachparent also was encouraged to add goals that heor she felt was important but were not queriedby the interviewer.

For example, one (low-income, European-American) mother's inferred goals were:having good social skills, importance of learn-ing, being happy, wanting to learn. The fol-lowing discussion between the mother and theinterviewer illustrates the negotiation of theinferred goal "importance of learning."

/: Okay, and then another one (goal) was... about the importance of her learning.There you talked about her doing her home-work and interested in getting the "Hookedon Phonics" for them to work with.M: Yeah, I have it, and it's worked forWhitney (focal child's older sister) and she'sdoing it, too good to be true. Maybe she'lljust, someday she'll have patience for it, andshe just won't have no patience for it at all.It..., that's probably normal on my family, ...


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Table 2Parents' Salient Developmental Goals Extrapolated from Negotiations in Ethnotheory Interview #2

Social/Moral Goals

1. Grow up safely

2. Stay away from violence

3. Share things with friends

4. Form close trusting relationships

5. Learn to get along with others

6. Be considerate of others

7. Learn how to act in public

8. Learn faith in God

9. Learn right from wrong

10. Learn to be respectful of adults and parents

11. Learn to use good judgment

Personal Goals

12. Be sure of him/herself, know. that she/he has something to contribute

13. Grow up happy, enjoy life

14. Get to be what she/he wants

15. Set his or her goals/choices

16. Be imaginative

17. Learn to be responsible

18. Become independent

Academic/Intellectual Goals

19. Express herself or himself

20. Learn about the world

21. Develop attention span

22. Learn to plan

23. Learn to do things for his/her self

24. Learn the value of money

25. Learn to read

26. Stay in school

27. Learn skills for doing well in school

28. Be persistent, motivated to learn

29. Learn to take responsibility for his or her own learning

30. Enjoy reading


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'cause I, I got two instances where you just,I've got two brothers and sisters that can't readand write 'cause, it's like their tolerance is notvery well....

I: So does that sound right to you? Doyou feel that one of the things that youfeel for Catherine is the "importance ofher learning"?M: Mm -hmm.Most of the respondents agreed to the goal

formulations that were proposed to them by theRA with little or no modification, althoughseveral added some further socialization goalsto the list. In some cases, caregivers reformu-lated one or more of the inferred goals asinitially proposed to them by the RA.

Our interest in identifying important con-cerns of caregivers regarding the developmentof their children led us to an investigation ofthe validity of our procedures. The results giveus confidence in the usefulness of parentalgoals established in this way for further analy-sis of the ways in which the implicit theories ormodels held by caregivers contribute to theeco-cultural niche of child development. In theevent that others will find the approach useful,we describe in more detail elsewhere (Serpellet al., in preparation) the attempts we made toestablish for ourselves the reliability and validi-ty of our procedure. A summary appearsbelow.

Several months after Ethnotheory #2, twoRA's independently searched for behavioralevidence to corroborate the authenticity of 178of the 234 negotiated goals (76%). They inde-pendently examined the caregiver diaries,reviewed transcripts of Ethnotheory #1 inwhich caregivers provided elaborated discus-

sions related to meanings of activities androutines, and studied RA notes verifying thederivation of the initial set of proposed goals.For example, one mother endorsed the goal"reading." Evidence supporting this endorse-ment came from several reports of reading inthe diary (reading books with members of thefamily, going to Pizza Hut for a Book-It pro-gram) as well as the mother mentioning inEthnotheory #1 that "as soon as she comeshome from school, either she brings out thecoloring book and the paint, or the books toread").

Supportive evidence was found in either thediaries, Ethnotheory #1 interview, or both forabout 90% of the goals presented to the parentsduring Ethnotheory #2. Approximately 10% ofthe goals were corroborated by statements inthe diaries, approximately 46 % were supportedby statements in Ethnotheory #1, and approxi-mately 33 % were supported both in the diaryand Ethnotheory #1. In around 9 % of thecases, the only confirmation for goals identifi-cation came from the RA's field notes. And inonly around 2 % of the cases was there noindependent corroboration for the goals. How-ever, in all instances, even those few where wecould not trace how these goals were initiallyidentified, all final goals were endorsed byparents as being accurate.

Categorization of parental socializationgoals. The endorsed goals were assigned onintuitive conceptual grounds to one of fourcategories: social/moral (including rejection ofviolence, prosocial attitudes, tolerance, re-spectful behavior); personal (including self-esteem, confidence; pleasure, self-actualization,responsibility); intellectual (including everydayintelligence, competence, communication); or


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Table 3Percentage of Parents Endorsing Social, Personal, Academic, and Intellectual Goals DuringEthnotheory Interview 2

Low Income Middle Income Full Sample

EuAm AfAm

Academic 82 71 71 76

Intellectual 47 71 43 55

Personal 88 86 100 90

Social/Moral 94 86 100 92

or academic (including achievement motiva-tion, academic achievement, and literacy) (seeTable 2). When the exact meaning of a respon-dent's goal was unclear, the interview tran-scripts were reviewed to clarify the meaning.Reliability for the coding was established byhaving a second coder independently categorize50% of all the parental goals. Reliability was94 % for social/moral goals, 100% for personalgoals, 100% for intellectual goals, and 94% foracademic goals. Disagreements were resolvedby discussion.

Parents were asked to endorse and rankbetween 3 and 7 socialization goals; the meannumber of goals endorsed by each parent was6.11 (SD = 1.74). Parents tended to endorsegoals in all four categories, as reflected by amean of 3.13 (SD = .78) categories endorsed.However, parents were more likely to endorseat least one personal or social/moral goal thanan academic or intellectual goal (Cochran's Q(3) = 11.026, p = .012). There were no signif-icant sociocultural differences in the nature ofendorsed goals. Table 3 shows the percentages

of parents who endorsed goals in the fourcategories.

Priorities in parents' socialization goalswere revealed in the rankings they provided.Thirteen parents gave the highest ranking to asocial/moral goal, 11 to a personal goal, 6 toan intellectual goal, and 8 to an academic goal.These differences among top-ranked categorieswere not statistically significant. However,there was a tendency for parents to be morelikely to highly rank a social/moral or personaltype of goal than an academic or intellectualgoal, Chi-squared (1) = 2.63, p < .10. Therewere no sociocultural differences in patterns ofhighly ranked goals.

The enduring nature of parental socializa-tion goals. Parents' goals initially were in-ferred from their responses to questions aboutthe meanings of everyday activities, and thenthese possible goals were proposed to theparents as we negotiated actual goals. Severalmonths later we used another elicitation meth-od for documenting parents' goals for theirchildren. A list of all goals initially endorsedby the parents was generated, and it was deter-


22


mined that despite minor wording variations,all could be encompassed within a set of 30(see Table 2). As much as possible we usedparents' own words in generating the list ofcommon goals. We presented the list to theparents and asked them to rate the importanceof each goal on a scale of 1 to 5 and then rankorder the 9 most important ones.

Parents continued to attach importance toapproximately 1/3 of the original negotiatedgoals (i.e., they gave ratings of 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale), suggesting that there is an endur-ing nature to some parental socialization goals.Moreover, goals that were enduring werefrequently (63% of the time) among the topthree negotiated goals ranked during the previ-ous interview. The nature of the highly rankedgoals was similar across sociocultural groups.

Parental Ideas About Optimal Ways toCultivate Literacy

In addition to asking parents about their ownsocialization goals for their children, we askedthem to consider socialization processes in thefollowing five domains: morality ("learningright from wrong"), physical science ("learn-ing about the physical world"), communication("learning to communicate effectively withothers"), literacy ("learning to read andwrite"), and numeracy ("learning about num-bers"). Parents were asked, "What is the mosteffective way of helping your child learn (do-main X)?" (see Appendix A). An analysis ofthe full range of responses to this set of ques-tions and how the coding scheme was devel-oped is presented elsewhere (Serpell et al., inpreparation). In this report we compare and

contrast responses only in the morality andliteracy domains. We first consider the natureof the interventions recommended and then weconsider how these were related to other as-pects of parents' literacy orientation.

The Nature of the Intervention for FosteringLearning

Our coding scheme for categorizing therespondents' formulations of optimal interven-tion strategies was developed through a seriesof inductive steps interpreting selected sets ofparental responses in the light of psychologicaltheories of cognitive development (Serpell etal., in preparation). Three broad categories ofintervention strategy were identified, as fol-lows:a) Proactive intervention, including:

(1) deliberate instruction(2) modelling(3) motivating

b) In flight responsiveness, including:(4) differential reinforcement(5) contingent guidance(6) zoped matching

c) Reliance on the child's (7) experience,including both attempts to provide favorableenvironmental opportunities and a hands-offapproach.

The distinctions among these categories ofpreferred, or "optimal," intervention strategiesare drawn in terms of where the respondentlays primary emphasis: on deliberate proactiveinterventions designed to impact directly on thechild's behavior, cognition, or motivation; onopportunistic responses to the child's behavioras it occurs; or on a less directly interventionist


23


stance that relies primarily on the impact ofexperiences that the child will encounter inself-governed activities in certain settingsaperspective consistent with Piaget's (1971)constructivist theory of cognitive developmentas driven by exploration and the related educa-tional tradition of "discovery learning." Anexplicit theory of how best to foster childdevelopment probably needs to combine all ofthese elements, and we do not wish to suggestthat they are in any sense mutually exclusive orincompatible. However, most of the verbalformulations that parents advanced in responseto our inquiry about how they conceived themost effective way to help their child to learnin a given domain were quite selective.

The expression "in flight responsiveness"was borrowed from Tharp and Gallimore(1988) to describe an instructional attitude oftrying to respond to the child's behavior op-portunistically. Within this category we distin-guished interventions that focused on providingpositive or negative feedback to the behaviorexhibited by the child in accordance with theparent's perception of its appropriateness (wetermed this "differential reinforcement" fol-lowing the usage of Skinner [1953]), and thosethat focused on guiding the child's responses inthe direction of a desired outcome (contingentguidance). The small number of formulationswithin this latter category that were termed"zoped matching" (following Vygotsky's[1978] theoretical conception of instruction asassisting performance within the learner's zoneof proximal development, cf. Vygotsky [1978];Newman, Griffin, & Cole [1989]) reflected aconscious attempt by the parent to calibrate herresponse to the child's behavior relative to

what she construed as the next step in thechild's development.

Table 4 presents a definition and one or twoexamples for each category. In a small numberof cases, the parent's explanation explicitlyincorporated two different strategic elements,and both codes were assigned to the sameresponse. Reliability of the coding scheme wasestablished by having three independent raterscode all responses; the coding was consideredreliable if two of the three raters agreed on aresponse. The overall reliability of our codingsranged from 65% to 87%.

The distribution of preferred types of inter-vention for the literacy and morality domainsis shown in Table 5. Two types of contrast areapparent: between the two domains of literacyand moral development, and within the literacydomain between the middle-income and low-income samples. Proactive intervention strate-gies were more often preferred for helpingchildren learn to read and write than for learn-ing right and wrong (McNemar's test for thesignificance of changes yielded a value of Chi-squared [1] = 3.76, p = .05). And whendiscussing how to foster learning to read andwrite, low-income parents were more likely tocite forms of proactive intervention than mid-dle-income parents (Chi-squared [1] = 3.24,.10 > p > .05).

Relations Between Preferred Modes ofIntervention and Orientations TowardLiteracy Development.

As mentioned in the Introduction to thisreport, our previous analyses extrapolated from


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Table 4 (revised September 1996)Parental conceptions of the most effective way to help their child to learn to read and write, or tolearn right from wrong.

(A) Proactive Intervention

Caregiver specifies deliverate, proactive interventions designed to impace directly on the child'sbehavior, cognition, or motivation.

(1) Deliberate instructionCaregiver actively informs or teaches the child by sharing or giving knowledge, facts, orexamples, such as in helping, practicing, telling, or demonstrating a given behavior.Example (literacy): "take time out to sit down with them and to study, to plan"

(Low-income African American parent)(morality): "I try to sit down and talk to hertry to show .:. right from wrong."

(Low-income European American parent)(2) ModellingCaregiver provides information to the child through her/his own actions or behaviors; setting anexample.Example (literacy): "by example, because they are read to and they see you writing ... signing

off of cards ... you read the cards to them ..."(Middle-income African American parent)

(morality): "by example ... no matter what you do, your children set you up as theexample of what's right and wrong: they see everything you do as right. Ifyou vary from what you do, then they consider that, they see that's differentand they're gonna ask youthey're gonna question it, you know 'Why didyou do that Daddy ?' Why'd you do that Mummy?' That's some of the firstthingswithout even dealing with what's wrong. "(Middle-income African American parent)

(3) MotivatingCaregiver provides emotional support or promotes self-efficacy.Example (literacy): "encouraging him to write"

(Middle-income European American parent)

(B) In-Flight ResponsivenessCaregiver focuses on the importance of responding appropriately to the child's behavior when andas it occurs.

(4) Differential reinformcementCaregiver emphasizes consequences or outcomes of behaviors. Desired behaviors or goals aresupported through (1) punishment, (2) external reward, or (3) promise of long-term positiveoutcome.Example (morality): "just teaching them what, from when they start toddling around: 'You can't

touch that; that's a No No!' ... giving them somehting else they can touch inplace of what they can't touch. Don't just say 'you can't do that' and walk


25


away, you know I don't think that's a good ideagive them somehting elsethey can do. Don't back down if they do something wrong that they know iswrong. Don't back down on it: if you say 'I'm gonna punish you: You'regonna stay up in your room until dinner's done', don't back down. Makethem stay up in their room until dinner's done."(Low-income European American parent)

(5) Contingent guidanceCaregiver uses child's experiences to instruct. Current abilities, strenghts, interests, or weaknessesof the child act as the impetus for intervention. The child's behaviors/needs are assessed and thecaregiver moves to correct, strengthen, or direct the child twoard achievement of goal. In essencethe caregiver "seizes the opportunity for teaching:"Example (literacy): "Like, she'll sit down and ... she'll ask me ... how to spell her sister's name.

She already knows that, but she gets mixed up on her sister's name a lot ...She gets mixed up on the last letters ... she'll say 'Oh yeah, that's right:A! ' "(Low-income European American parent)

(morality): "if you see them do something wrong, you correct them and tell themfromexperience, I guess ... you tell them what to do instead, and how they shouldact."(Low-income European American parent)

(6) Zoped matchingCaregiver articulates the need to calibrate her contingent responses to the child's behavior relativeto the next step in the child's development.Example (morality): "reason, ... but it's not always easy to reason with a kid, it's sometimes hard

to get back to that level, and remember, 'now how was she thinking', let'sturn it around so she'll get this and then you finally come up with somethingand then you fell like 'wow I'm doing it!(Middle-income African American parent)

(C) Reliance on the Child's Experience

Caregiver recognizes the role of experiential learning and furnishes the child with materials andopportunities, emphasizing the importance of the child independently learning through experience,or trial and error.

Example (literacy): "just being around it, I think, and offering them, having the materials to doit and ... notpushing to hard.... If they enjoy it like he doeshe colors, hedoes all that stuffit'll just come."(Middle-income European American parent)

(morality): "let them learn from their mistakes ... because you can tell a child, 'don'tdo this', and 'do that', and 'do that', and they will learn until it actuallyhappens ... they have to do it in order to learn from their mistakes."(Low-income African American parent)


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Table 5 (revised September 1996)Distribution of Parents' Preferred Types of Intervention for Literacy and Morality Development

Types of Interventions

In flightresponsiveness

Proactiveintervention

Relianceon experience

Reading and Writing

Low-IncomeEuropean American 73% 13% 13%(N = 15)

Low-IncomeAfrican American 75% 8% 17%(N = 12)

Middle-Income 29% 29% 43%(N = 7)

Full Sample 65% 15% 21%(N = 34)

Right and Wrong

Low-IncomeEuropean American 33% 67% 0(N = 15)

Low-IncomeAfrican American 54% 38% 8%(N = 12)

Mid-Income 57% 43% 0(N = 7)

Full Sample 45% 53% 3%(N = 34)

parental reports of their children's recurrentactivities (in response to earlier steps of ourelicitation procedures) a set of three comple-mentary cultural themes that conceptualizeliteracy as a source of entertainment, as a set ofskills to be learned, or as an integral feature ofeveryday life (Baker et al., 1994). In order toexplore the relevance of these themes to the

pattern of children's early literacy develop-ment, we devised an index of the degree towhich a given family appeared to give promi-nence to each of these themes. We focused onthe entertainment and skills themes becausethey were more prominent and because theirimplications for socialization practices aresomewhat contradictory. Theme endorsement


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Table 6 (revised September 1996)Percentage of Parents Favoring Proactive Intervention, Contingent Guidance, or Experiential Strategies forHelping their Child Learn to Read and Write According to the Cultural Theme Emphasized in the Niche

Proactiveintervention

Preferred intervention strategy

In-flightresponsiveness

Reliance onexperience

Literacy themeemphasis:

Entertainment (n = 11) 36% 9% 55%

Balanced/non-committal (n = 9) 67% 33% 0

Skills (n = 11) 91% 9% 0

was jointly indexed by a content analysis of thediaries and by the parents' response to thequestion from the Ethnotheory #2 interviewabout the most effective way to help their childlearn to read and write (see Sonnenschein etal., 1996 for further information on the natureof the coding and the devised score).

Our further analysis now affords an oppor-tunity to examine the relationship between thatinitial classification scheme and several otherdimensions of caregiver ethnotheories. In orderto classify families in terms of literacy themeendorsement, the distributions of each set ofliteracy theme endorsement scores were firstdivided into roughly equal proportions of high,medium, and low levels of endorsement basedon a ranking of scores. Each family was thenassigned to one of the following categories:

Entertainment emphasis (n=12): Highendorsement of entertainment and either low(N=7) or medium (N =3) endorsement of

skills, or medium endorsement of entertain-ment and low endorsement of skills (N=2).

Skills emphasis (n=12): High endorsementof skills and either low (N = 8) or medium(N=4) endorsement of entertainment.

Balanced or non-committal view (n = 11):Endorsement of both themes (entertainmentand skills at the same level, high/high (n=1),medium/medium (n=6), or low/low (n=4).

Consistent with our analyses based only ondiary data (Baker et al., 1994), middle-incomefamilies tended to be overrepresented in theentertainment-emphasis group and low-incomefamilies in the skills-emphasis group (Fisher'sexact probability test, excluding the ba-lanced/non-committal group, yielded a two-tailed p < .02). Within the low-income sam-ple, African American families more often fellinto the skills emphasis group than EuropeanAmerican families (p < .01).

We next considered the relation betweenthe literacy orientation of the niche (skills


28


emphasis, balanced/non-committal, entertain-ment emphasis) and the nature of the interven-tion strategy explicitly favored by the parentsfor helping their child learn to read and write.Table 6 shows a cross-tabulation of the percent-age of caregivers espousing one of the threeliteracy views and their preferred interventionstrategy for the domain of literacy. Almost allthe parents who emphasized a skills orientationto emergent literacy favored proactive interven-tion, whereas among those who emphasized theentertainment orientation, the most popularintervention strategy was reliance on the child'sexperience. (Omitting both the balanced/non-committal group and the group favoring in-flight responsiveness yielded a Fisher's Exactp < .02.)

Although this is not a startling empiricalfinding, because the data used for the twocodings overlapped to some extent, it doesconstitute a strong validation of our earlierinterpretation as well as an elaboration of it.First, we can now see more clearly that thedistribution of orientations toward the culturalthemes of literacy as a source of entertainmentor as a set of skills to be learned is not sharplydichotomous: a substantial number of familiesappear to hold a balanced view that acknowl-edges the two cultural themes fairly equally.Second, the orientation of parents towardliteracy as a source of entertainment has pre-dictable consequences for their preferred strate-gy of intervention: such parents are more likelyto express a preference for allowing the childto learn about literacy through exploration anddiscovery. This does not mean that they takefor granted that the child will learn without anyhelp, but they do tend to be less inclined to

provide explicit instruction in these earlyyears, preferring to engineer the environmentin such a way that multiple opportunities occurfor the child to acquire skills while discoveringthe pleasures of literacy. Third, this newperspective on the parents' ideas about childsocialization shows that the type of interventionpreferred by parents for fostering their child'sdevelopment is considerably dependent on thedomain under consideration. For instance,there was no correlation between the interven-tion strategy preferences of the parents in oursample for the socialization of literacy andtheir strategy preferences for the socializationof morality (chi-squared < 1).

Parental Views About the Contrastive Re-sponsibility of the Home and School in Culti-vating Literacy

Parents were asked as part of the Ethno-theory #2 interview to compare the responsibil-ities of the home and the school for fosteringdevelopment in various domains (see AppendixA). Again we focus here only on the literacyand morality domains. Parental responses werecoded into one of three mutually exclusivecategories: primarily school, primarily home,equal emphasis between the home and school.The latter category included responses to theeffect that a domain was cultivated initially athome but then primarily at school. Reliabilitywas determined by having a secon rater inde-pendently code all of the responses. Overallinterrater agreetment was 86% .

As shown in Table 7, there was a pro-nounced difference in the amount of respon-sibility attributed to school relative to home


29

22 Serpell, Sonnenschein, Baker, Hill, Goddard-Truitt, & Dadseco

Table 7The Percentage of Parents Assigning Primary Responsibility to the Home or School for Children's Learning

Primarily Home Both School and Home Primarily School

Right and Wrong

Low-IncomeEuropean American 42.9% 57.1% 0

Low-IncomeAfrican American 91.7% 8.3% 0

Mid-Income 42.9% 57.1% 0

Full Sample 60.6% 39.4% 0

Reading and Writing

Low-IncomeEuropean American 6.7% 53.3% 46.6%

Low-IncomeAfrican American 30.8% 46.2% 23.1%

Mid-Income 14.3% 42.9% 42.9%

Full Sample 17.1% 48.6% 34.3%

depending on the domain in question. Noparents regarded school as primarily responsi-ble for promoting children's knowledge ofright or wrong; in fact, most parents (61 %)reported that the home was primarily responsi-ble for fostering this aspect of moral develop-ment. In contrast, only 17 % of the parentsreported that the home was primarily responsi-ble for fostering literacy development. Theparents were fairly equally divided betweenattributing responsibility to both the home andschool and to the school alone.

The various sociocultural groups displayeda high degree of consensus in their attributions,and most of the sociocultural comparisons were

not statistically significant. However, low-income African American parents were signifi-cantly more likely than low-income EuropeanAmerican parents to view the home as primari-ly responsible for promoting moral develop-ment, (1) = 6.80, p < .009. Low-incomeEuropean American families were more likelyto report that both the home and school areresponsible for development in this domain.

Individual Approaches to the Socialization ofLiteracy

In the preceding sections we discussedparental goal hierarchies, beliefs about optimal


30


modes of intervention, endorsement of particu-lar cultural themes about literacy, and respon-sibilities of the home and school. In this sec-tion, we will illustrate how these various com-ponents of a caregiver's implicit theoreticalmodel fit together by integrating these variousdimensions into a single idiographic profile.

We begin with three parents, drawn fromthe three different sociocultural groups, all ofwhom expressed a marked and enduring con-cern with nurturing their child's developmentin the domain of literacy and/or schooling. Wethen consider two other parents whose salientconcerns were in domains other than litera-cy/schooling.

Literacy domain: low-income African Ameri-can mother. Mrs. J., a 33-year-old, low-in-come African American mother of two, is afull-time homemaker who has never workedoutside the home since completing high school.Other members of the household are Amina,the focal child, her brother who is two yearsolder, and their stepfather. Our analysis re-vealed just one "enduring" goal for this parent,coded as "learn skills for doing well inschool." Mrs. J. wrote in her diary three timesthat Amina had asked when being tucked up inbed "Is there school tomorrow?" Also, duringEthno #1, she interpreted the recurrent activityof Amina "playing school with her brother andcousin" as follows:

to me it would mean, like, she enjoys schoola lot. It would mean she really likes school alot and she can't get enough of school. Ithink it is she just don't stay in school longenough. If it got to the point when Aminawould have to stay in school all day, shewould do it!Earlier during that interview she remarked:

Yesterday she didn't have no school and shewanted to go to school but there was noschool for her yesterday. It was only schoolfor, like, the afternoon children.... She theonly child I see that loves to go to school.Most children wouldn't care if they went ornot.When the topic of spending a lot of time on

school activities was explored at the beginningof the Ethno #2 interview, Mrs. J. explained:

it is like she's really focusing on all thework she is doing now, because some-times Amina gets in there and she thinksit's really playtime a lot of the school,but then she has to, likeI have to let,tell her that it is not playtime all thetime in school: you have to sit there andwork, 'cause Amina get in school andwon't open her mouth!

I: Right, and why d'you feel it is importantthat she has to spend this time on let's sayschool thingssince that's what she likes?

M: Well, it is good that she, you know,focuses on it, because, as she movesfrom one grade to another she'll knowthat work that....

I: So, it is to know her school work bet-ter?

M: Uhhm, 'cause you see right now she isin Pre-K, but she is on athey put heron a level like Kindergarten. So, whenshe move to Kindergarten, she alreadybe prepared for all that.

When asked to rank the seven goals formu-lated up to that point, Mrs. J. ranked "to knowher school work better" as number 1.

Five months later, in the fall, when she waspresented with the full array of goals cited byparents in the intellectual and academic do-main, Mrs. J. rated nine of them with a "5 =


31


one of the most important things for me," andranked the following highest overall:1. learn to read2. learn to do things for herself3. stay in school4. learn skills for doing welrin schoolBelow these came several goals in the socialand moral domain:5. grow up safely6. learn faith in God7. learn right from wrong8. learn to be respectful to adults and parents9. learn to use good judgmentNone of the goals in the personal domain wereselected for this top tier, even though severalreceived ratings of 5.

When asked about the optimal interventionmethod for helping a child of this age to learnto read and write, Mrs. J. replied:

To me the way I would do it, I would like sitAmina down and I would write her name outfirst and then I would tell Amina to make thefirst letter. She'll pick a book on her ownand, you know, she pretend she read butwhen I sits there and read with her, youknow, I points to the word as I read alongwith her so she'll know how to, you know,identify the word that I am reading. I wouldthink that soon, when she get in kindergar-ten, Amina she will be able to read andwrite.

This was coded as an instance of belief in theefficacy of deliberate instruction, a form ofproactive intervention.

When asked about the relative degrees andkinds of responsibility of the school and thehome for various "parts of the child's learn-ing," Mrs. J. attributed greater responsibilityto the home for learning about what is rightand wrong and for learning to read and write.

With respect to the two cultural themesabout the nature of emergent literacy, Mrs. J.received a medium-level rating on our index ofendorsement of the theme of literacy as asource of entertainment (2.20), and a highrating on the index of endorsement of thetheme of literacy as a skill to be taught (3.00).

Literacy domain: low-income EuropeanAmerican mother. Mrs. R., a low-income,European American mother of three, is 26 anda graduate of a Catholic High School. She doesnot currently work outside the home and liveswith her two sons (William, the focal child,and Norman, who is two years older) and adaughter (Rachel, three years younger). Ouranalysis revealed four "enduring" goals for thismother, coded as "get a good education,""self-confidence," "learn to do things forhimself," and "do what makes him happy."The goal "get a good education" was not oneof the goals proposed to Mrs. R. during theEthno #2 interview, but was a goal that Mrs.R. added. A review of the diary showed thateducational activities, particularly readingbooks at bedtime, were routine. For example,Mrs. R. wrote:

Going to Bed Act.William is laying in his bed.. And Norman inhis. They just Said There prays. I'm Readingthem A Alf book. Now They are fast asleep.William has No Trouble going Too sleep.During the ecological inventory interview,

Mrs. R. again indicated that educational activi-ties were important to her, that she read to herchildren every night, and that they wouldsometimes "make-up homework" and that she"works with them" on their numbers.

Mrs. R. ranked "Get a good education"second of seven goals. She explained: "So he


32


can continue his life for himself and get a goodjob and take care of himself, in case I'm notaround."

When the interviewer asked what wouldhelp foster his getting a good education, Mrs.R. replied,

Well, I will be here to talk to him about itand entice him to do it and let him know thathe's important to have a good education.'Cause it's something I never got and now Irealize it's something I should have had, youknow?Four months later, when she was presented

with the full array of goals cited by parents inthe intellectual and academic domain, Mrs. R.rated five of them with a "5 = one of the mostimportant things for me," and ranked thefollowing among her top nine goals overall:6. learn to do things for himself7. learn to take responsibility for his ownlearning9. stay in school

Three other goals that she ranked highlywere in the social and moral domain:3. learn to be respectful to adults and parents4. learn right from wrong5. learn faith in Godand three others in the personal domain:1. grow up happy, and enjoy life2. set his own goals, make his own choices8. know that he has something to contribute

When asked about the optimal interventionmethod for helping a child learn to read andwrite, Mrs. R. responded:

Me, helping here at home and his teachershelp him in school.I: With any specific kinds of activities?M: What do you mean by that?I: Like you help him here, in general

helping him or helping him with ... ?

M: Well, whatever he wants me to. Or likewhen he brings paper home fromschool we do that, or sometimes....

I: So helping him with things that arerelated to reading, like the book.

M: Uh huh.This was coded as an indication of belief indeliberate instruction.

When asked about the relative degrees andkinds of responsibilities of the school and thehome for various "parts of the child's learn-ing," Mrs. R. indicated that the home and theschool shared the responsibility equally forlearning about what's right and wrong. Howev-er, she attributed greater responsibility to theschool for the child's learning to read andwrite; because in school, children can "sharedifferent books."

With respect to the two cultural themesabout the nature of emergent literacy, Mrs. R.received a low rating on our index of endorse-ment of the theme of literacy as a source ofentertainment (0.80) and a high rating on theindex of endorsement of the theme of literacyas a skill to be taught (3.00).

Literacy domain: middle-income AfricanAmerican mother. Mrs. M., a 30-year-old,middle-income African American mother offour, works part-time as a realtor, is trained insecretarial work, and has written a book aimedat an audience of young children on her com-puter, which she hopes to get published. Othermembers of the household are Jennifer, thefocal child, her brothers who are one and threeyears older, her younger sister, and their fatherwho works two jobs, one part-time in theevenings, and has almost completed a universi-ty degree. Our analysis revealed four "endur-ing" goals for this parent, coded as "set her


33


own goals in life," "learn to be responsible,""become independent," and "stay in school/getan education." Mrs. M. wrote in her diary atone juncture:

We have mommy school today we have art.That's our major activity. We always havehomework in our major activity & our majoractivity today is art. I covered the walls ofthe boys room with tag board and I gavethem markers paint, crayons, diff't sizemarkers and fluorescent, lots of color, sothey had plenty to work with. They had glueand they could stick things on to the tagboard. I covered it w/8 sheets of tag board &each of them had a section & they workedwell. They wrote things, they drew picturesof people. Jennifer likes to write. Jennifer isa natural journalist I'd say. She keeps ajournal at home, she writes things that shedoes, people that she know....During the Ecological Inventory, Mrs. M.

explained with reference to "word games" thatthey occur:

quite often, because I make them look every-thing up in the dictionary. Yeah, everythingthat, well, 'do you know what that means'?And they can't trip the other one up: 'youdon't know what that meansMom's goingto make you get the dictionary!' So I makeher get the dictionary, and we look it up.With reference to refrigerator displays, she

recounted the following anecdote:Well, now that John is reading and he'sreading everything to Peter and everyoneelse, he looks on the refrigerator last weekand said, "Wow mommy, I like that, that'slooks cute." I said, "What is it?" "Life isn'tpassing me by, it's running me over." [Ev-eryone laughs.] I said, "Yeah I've had that awhile," and he says, "Yeah but now I know

what it says." So it, you know he can read itnow, we started out with words, you know aword a week. And one word a week we usedthe magnetic alphabet letters. And we putthem on there and any time during the day Imight say spell egg or whatever. And theyhave to remember they saw it on the refrig-erator, what is it, and they spell it. So if I getthem, I get to raz them and they hate that,they are like you couldn't even spell it sodon't even, so we do that.The family has a large collection of books

for children of all ages. Mrs. M elaborates:They have that Early World of Learningfrom, who makes that Childcraft? Rare BookEncyclopedia? We have that set, so we havethe Childcraft, Early World, and the WorldBook Encyclopedias. And that has all kindsof activities in it, books and coloring and allsorts of things.... We've got ABCs, we'vegot the laminated ones, we've got everythingfrom the very first book you can have fabric,all the way up. Anybody of any age cancome and there is something there for you.Even something if you just want somethingold we've got them from the 1940s.During the Ethno #2 interview, we asked

her to explain the concept of "mommyschool." She replied:

Mommy school got started when they wereinfants. I used to exercise them. So westarted out with an aerobics class. And so,everything I taught them was a learningthing, and they always wanted to know"When are we going to school?" "Well,you're in school, you're in mommy school:all your life, you have mom; so that's mom-my school." Everything they learn from meis a part of mommy school. We had formalsessions, because the girls were home in thedaytime and the boys were in school. So the


3


girls had mommy school that they could call"Well, we do go to school!" (I: Oh, OK,right!) So that's how we came up with thename Mommy school.When asked to rank the seven goals formu-

lated up to that point, Mrs. M. ranked "educa-tion" as No. 2.

Five months later, when she was presentedwith the full array of goals cited by parents inthe intellectual and academic domain, Mrs. M.rated five of them with a "5 = one of the mostimportant things for me," and ranked thefollowing among her top nine goals overall:5. learn to do things for herself6. be persistent, motivated to learn7. stay in schoolShe also rated very high overall several goalsin the social and moral domain:1. learn faith in God4. learn to use good judgment9. learn to get along with othersand in the personal domain:2. become independent3. learn to be responsible8. set her own goals and make her own choices

When asked about the optimal interventionmethod for helping a child of this age to learnto read and write, Mrs. M. replied: "let themdraw, they're scribbling." This was coded asan instance of reliance on the child's experi-ence.

When asked about the relative degrees andkinds of responsibility of the school and thehome for various "parts of the child's learn-ing," Mrs. M. stated: "home: I basically thinkeverything should be learned at home andreinforced at school."

With respect to the two cultural themesabout the nature of emergent literacy, Mrs. M.

received a medium rating on our index ofendorsement of the theme of literacy as asource of entertainment (1.40), and a lowrating on the index of endorsement of thetheme of literacy as a skill to be taught (1.00).

Moral domain: African American, lowincome. Mrs. D. is a 36-year-old mother offour, who is currently not working but occa-sionally volunteers in school and in a nearbyhospital. Twirl, the focal child, is the thirdchild. His older siblings, Leon and Sharondaare 15 and 11 years older, while another broth-er, Throne, is just a year younger. They alllive in the same household, together with Twirland Throne's father, Mr. S.

Our analysis showed one enduring focus,"feel free to tell when he thinks something iswrong." During the Ethno #1 interview, Mrs.D. explained:

Yeah, you don't want them to be scared butyou don't want them to trust everybody. Andyou want them to be nice and respect every-body but you want them to trust you enoughto come and tell you anything and every-thing.... What I don't like about adults iswhen they say why you always snitching,you won't never have no friend cause youalways telling. And I always tell that personthat with my kids, they suppose to tell any-thing that they think is wrong. Because ifyou don't tell, you won't know what's rightor wrong.Based on Mrs. D.'s explanations about this

goal, it was classified as a moral goal. Whenthis goal was proposed to her during the Ethno#2, Mrs. D. ranked it as the sixth most impor-tant among seven goals. In another interviewthree months later, she was presented with thefull array of goals cited by parents in the social


35


and moral domain. Mrs. D. rated three of themwith a "5 = one of the most important thingsfor me," and ranked the following among hertop six goals overall:1. learn right from wrong2. learn to be respectful to adults and parents4. learn faith in God

She also rated very high the following goalsin the intellectual/academic domain:3. learn to do things for himself6. stay in schooland in the personal domain:5. know that he has something to contribute

When asked about the optimal interventionmethod for helping a child learn to read andwrite, Mrs. D. explained: "That's really doingit with them, showing them. You know, takingtime to do it with them. And by reading tothem." This was coded as an indication ofbelief in deliberate instruction.

When asked about the relative degrees andkinds of responsibilities of the school and thehome for various "parts of the child's learn-ing," Mrs. D. attributed more responsibility tothe school for the child's learning to read andwrite. In contrast, she attributed greater re-sponsibility to the home for the child's learningabout right and wrong.

With respect to the two cultural themesabout the nature of emergent literacy, Mrs. D.received a medium rating on our index ofendorsement of the theme of literacy as asource of entertainment (1.80) and a mediumrating on the index of endorsement of thetheme of literacy as a skill to be taught (2.00).

Personal domain: middle-income EuropeanAmerican mother. Mrs. C., a 27-year-old,middle-income, European American mother of

four, works 25 hours a week in the retail trade.She dropped out of high school in the eleventhgrade, but went on to obtain the GED. Othermembers of the household are Jenny, the focalchild, her two brothers who are two and fouryears older, her baby sister, and their step-father. Our analysis revealed two "enduring"goals for this parent, coded as "become inde-pendent" and "becoming an individual," bothof which were assigned to the personal do-main. Throughout her diary, Mrs. C. narratesincidents wherein she lets Jenny decide whatshe wants to do, for example, what to eat forbreakfast, choosing an Easter card for hergrandmother, going to the park, spending thenight over at her friend's house.

When several goals were proposed to herduring the Ethno #2 interview, Mrs. C. ranked"become independent" as the most importantamong three goals. She then added "becomingan individual," and ranked this as her secondmost important goal. In the next interviewthree months later, she was presented with thefull array of goals cited by parents in the per-sonal domain. Mrs. C. rated three of them witha "5 = one of the most important things forme," and ranked the following among her topnine goals overall:4. become independent7. set her own goals, make her own choices8. grow up happy, and enjoy life

She also gave high rankings to the followinggoals in the intellectual/academic domain:2. learn to do things for herself5. learn to read9. stay in schooland in the social/moral domain:1. learn to be respectful to adults and parents


36


3. be considerate of others, kind, and coopera-tive6. learn to use good judgment

When asked about the optimal interventionmethod for helping a child learn to read andwrite, Mrs. C. explained: "If she asks mesomething, you know, well, say 'Is this that?'and I'll say 'No, this is that' ... and she'll say`What does it mean?" This was coded as aninstance of the strategy of contingent guidance.

When asked about the relative degrees andkinds of responsibilities of the school and thehome for various "parts of the child's learn-ing," Mrs. C. attributed more responsibility tothe school for the child's learning to read andwrite, whereas the home has more responsibili-ty for the child's learning about what is rightand wrong.

With respect to the two cultural themesabout the nature of emergent literacy, Mrs. C.received a low rating on our index of endorse-ment of the theme of literacy as a source ofentertainment (0.00) and a low rating on theindex of endorsement of the theme of literacyas a skill to be taught (1.00).

Closing comments. The multidimensionalcomplexity of these idiographic profiles tendsto undermine attempts at generalization. Al-though we have been able to detect certainpatterns of association, as presented in previoussections, it is clear that much of the "unex-plained variance" arises from the uniqueness ofeach caregiver's conceptualization of herrelationship with a particular child in a particu-lar set of social circumstances.

Discussion

This investigation of parental ideas situatesthe topic of emergent literacy within the broad-

er context of their socialization goal hierarchyand their conceptions of optimal interventionstrategies to foster children's development invarious domains. We found that most of theparents in our sample acknowledged literacyamong the developmental outcomes they de-sired for their child and sought actively topromote. These were, however, only one partof a broad array of parental goals that rangedacross moral, social, personal, and intellectualdomains. Indeed, although for some parentslearning to read and write was one of theirmost salient socialization goals, for many itoccupied a position secondary in importance tomoral, social, or personal development. Fur-thermore, a substantial proportion of parentsregarded the cultivation of their child's literacyas primarily a responsibility of the school,whereas in the domain of moral developmentthe balance of responsibility was tipped moretoward the home.

At a finer grain level of analysis, we foundthat parents were generally able to articulate anaccount of their strategic approach to promot-ing their child's development in the directionof their goals. The strategies they preferredwere differentiated by domain, with morefrequent emphasis on proactive interventions(such as deliberate instruction) in the domainof literacy, and more emphasis on inflightresponsiveness (with contingent guidance ordifferential reinforcement) in the moral do-main. Those parents who favored a strategy ofproactive intervention tended to emphasize thetheme of literacy as a set of skills to be ac-quired and included a high proportion of resi-dents in low-income neighborhoods. Amongthe middle-income families on the other hand


37


many parents expressed a preference for reli-ance on the child's experience for them toacquire literacy through a process of discovery.These parents tended to emphasize the theme ofliteracy as a source of entertainment.

We have tried in this study to characterizethe patterning of parental ideas in terms oflinkages among components (endorsement ofcultural themes and preference for interactionstrategies), variation across domains of childdevelopment (proactive vs. other strategies xmoral vs. literacy development), and differ-ences between social groups. Each of thesedimensions of patterning serves to illustrate thecultural origins of the implicit models held byparents to explain the nature of child develop-ment and to guide their actions as parents.

It appears to us that few, if any, of theparents in our sample subscribe to a fullyarticulated theory or a strongly delineatedworld view. They did, however, often invokeexplanatory constructs that are consistent withone or more of the formal theories in thescientific literature (e.g., Skinner, 1953; Ban-dura, 1977; Piaget, 1971; Vygotsky, 1978).These constructs, and the themes about literacyas a set of skills or as a source of entertain-ment, are surely cultural in nature, reflectingideas in circulation within a particular societyand a particular historical era. The entertain-ment theme, for instance, is consonant with thenotion that childhood should be funa themewidely celebrated in late twentieth-centuryWestern media but much less conspicuous inEuropean accounts of childhood in the nine-teenth century (Valsiner & Lightfoot, 1992).

The fact that literacy occupies only a modestposition among most of our parents' goal

hierarchies serves as a valuable reminder thatteachers and literacy researchers interactingwith parents often use their prestige to focusthe parents' attention on an institutionallydefined agenda. Undoubtedly most parents inour sample acknowledge the importance oftheir child becoming literate. But for most ofthem this is only one of many equally impor-tant aspects of their socialization agenda.

The comparisons among groups in thisreport are hampered by the small numbers offamilies in each categorya shortcoming weexpect to be reduced in our future work as thesize of our longitudinal study's sample has nowdoubled. But this may not be the only explana-tion for the paucity of statistically significantdifferences between ethnic groups in our data.The cultural variables influencing parentalideas about literacy socialization in Americansociety are just as likely to reflect the impact ofeconomic circumstances as that of ethnicidentity.

Historically, certain groups have beenexcluded from the centers in which educationaltheory and school policy are determined, andthis may have resulted in curricula that are lessresponsive to the developmental needs of somegroups than others (Tharp 1989; Allen &Boykin, 1992). But over and above such struc-tural variables in the design of educationalprovision, differential access to education mustsurely influence the patterns of discourse abouteducation in various communities. Bruner(1990) has drawn attention to striking similari-ties between some of the characteristics oflanguage socialization described by Heath(1983) in the low-income, African Americancommunity in the Carolinas she called Track-


38


ton, and those described by P. Miller (1982) inthe low-income, European American communi-ty of South Baltimore. It is quite plausible tosuppose that in our study such similarities existin patterns of literacy socialization betweenlow-income African American and EuropeanAmerican families.

The principal challenge of our researchfindings for educators lies, we believe, in theneed to acknowledge the complexity, the ra-tionality, and the legitimacy of parental per-spectives on their child's development in fami-lies that have traditionally been regarded aslargely devoid of understanding of, or commit-ment to, the cognitive developmental needs oftheir children. We have encountered frequentechoes of this deficit orientation in our inter-views with teachers. Yet the picture that em-erges from the interviews described in thisreport is mainly one of perceptive and caringparents. Many of the ideas they expressed inresponse to our open-ended questions are closeto and compatible with cardinal features ofcontemporary educational orthodoxy (e.g., thevarious intervention strategies). But the linkag-es among these ideas are normally implicit andare only likely to be deployed in contextswhere the parents perceive that their compe-tence and goodwill are accepted as basic pre-mises.

The question of why so much commonalityexists among the ideas of scientific theories,educational policies, professional practitionersand lay parents is open to a number of differentlines of speculative explanation. It may be thathistorically theoretical ideas have trickled downand been incorporated into everyday discourse,folk theories, and common sense (c.f., Mosco-

vici, 1985). It may also be that theorists incor-porate unconsciously a great deal of their localculture's preconceptions in what they presentto academic audiences as formally derivedfrom research (Serpell, 1990). Either way, theidentification of such commonalities providesground for cooperative and co-constructivediscourse between parents and teachers in thedesign of children's introduction to the worldof literacy.

References

Allen, B. A., & Boykin, A. W. (1992). African-American children and the educational process:Alleviating cultural discontinuity through pre-scriptive pedagogy. School Psychology Review,21(4), 486-596.

Baker, L., Fernandez-Fein, S., Scher, D., & Wil-liams, H. (1996). The development of literacyprocesses in the home. In J. Metsala & L. Ehri(Chairs), Beginning Word Recognition. Confer-ence presented at the National Reading ResearchCenter, University of Maryland.

Baker, L., Serpell, R., & Sonnenschein, S. (1995).Opportunities for literacy learning in the homesof urban preschoolers. In L. M. Morrow (Ed.),Family Literacy: Connections in schools andcommunities (pp. 236-252). Newark, DE:International Reading Association.

Baker, L., Sonnenschein, S., Serpell, R., Fernandez-Fein, S., & Scher, D. (1994). Contexts of emer-gent literacy: Everyday home experiences of urbanpre-kindergarten children (Reading ResearchReport No. 24). Athens, GA: NRRC, Universi-ties of Georgia and Maryland College Park.

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of humandevelopment. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress.


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Appendix A

Caregiver Ethnotheory Interview #2

Date:

Remind M that we are interested in what it is like for FC to move from learning about things

at home to learning at school. Because we are trying to learn how to build on what children have

already learned in their homes and communities, we need to know what mothers think about

what is important for their children. The purpose of this interview is to learn from her about

what is important for FC's growth and learning.

Hierarchy of Goals for the Child's Development

8a. In our earlier conversation, you mentioned or hinted at the following thing you see as

important for FC as he/she is growing up (list at least 3 and up to 7 themes cited in response

to Part 1 items 3 to 7, pausing after each to clarify, confirm, reformulate interactively):

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8b. Which of these goals for . is the most important in your view?

WRITE ON NOTECARDS FOR RANKING

Prompt, if respondent is reluctant: "suppose a fairy godmother could give your child only one

43

of these qualities, which one would be your first choice?" and so on

Allow up to .3 ties per rank, but press for a minimum of three levels of the respondent's

hierarchy:

A: most important

B: next most important

C: less important, but still highly valued, and so on.

RECORD THIS RANKING:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8c. Are there any additional goals or hopes that you have for

If so, what are they?

WRITE ON CARDS

d. Where would you place this (each of these) relative to the other ones we have just

discussed?

RECORD NEW RANKING:

1.

2.

3.

44

4.

5.

6.

7.

Antecedents of Individual Differences on Various Dimensions of Psychological Functioning

9. Several things in a child's life affect her/his chances of becoming/achieving each of the things

you have listed. When you consider how differently things turn out for different children that

you know (explain by reference to older siblings, neighbors, or other children attending the same

pre-K, etc.), what do you think are the most important things affecting any child's, not just

development of (Goal #1)?

(If there are several goals tied at level A of the respondent's hierarchy, pose this Q. for each

of them before proceeding to level B, etc.)

CAN USE NOTECARDS HERE TO WORK WAY THROUGH GOALS

Goal #1:

Goal #2:

Goal #3:

Goal #4:

Goal #5:

Goal #6:

Goal #7:

Optimal Methods for Modifying (Nurturing, Channelling, etc.) Each Dimension

13. It seems that some parents have differing ideas about the most effective way of helping a

young child to learn these things, and teachers also do not always agree with one another about

45

this. What do you believe is the most effective way to help your child learn about some of these

things?

(a) learning about what's right and wrong

(b) learning about the physical world

(c) learning to speak and understand language communicate effectively with others

(d) learning to read and write

(e) learning about numbers

Relative Importance and Complementarily of Contributions of Home and School to the Child's

Development in Each Dimension

14. I'm going to ask you to tell me now how you feel about the responsibilities of the school

and the home for each of these parts of the child's learning. Does one of these two worlds in

which the child gains experience have more responsibility than the other, and do they have

different responsibilities?

For instance, in the case of

(a) learning about what's right and wrong, does the school have any responsibilities, and if so,

are they different from the responsibilities of you as a parent (caregiver) and the other adults

here in the child's home?

Which is more important (or are they both equally important)?

(b) What about the child's learning about the physical world

(e.g., where food comes from, how her/his own body works, how the seasons change, how

machines work, such as the electric light, the TV, the kitchen stove, the bus, etc.), does the

school have any responsibilities and, if so, are they different from the responsibilities of you as

a parent (caregiver) and the other adults here in the child's home?

46

Which is more important (or are they both equally important)?

(c) What about learning to communicate effectively with others?

(d) Learning to read and write?

(e) Learning about numbers?

47

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