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(2015) Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens, Dordrecht, Springer.
Learning at the family–school boundary
when new roles and identities are created
Delma Barros Filho
pp. 295-308
This chapter aims to analyze and discuss the ways poor families represent and promote their children's schooling processes, contextualized in a broad concept of education that includes activities developed along diverse contexts: family, school, and neighborhood. Brazilian illiterate and semi-illiterate adults who did not attend school are able to actively and efficiently arrange and guarantee formal schooling for their children. This chapter presents narratives about schooling from the standpoint of the family, as originating from various studies carried out at different points in time, based on in-depth interviews and focus groups. These studies have a common focus on ideas and practices related to childrearing. We assume that the ability to read codes belonging to a literate, science-based, and technological world is a standard that is literate in its orality—accomplished in the extent to which these parents engage in everyday activities in a literate society, whose rules and signs are pervasive and powerful, even without completing the formal cycles of schooling (Barros Filho 2012; Marinho and Carvalho 2010). This idea, given here as a tentative analogy, is a useful tool to analyze phenomena occurring at the borders of family, school, and contemporary society. As a general conclusion, it can be said that the issues related to literacy, through their children, worked as a lever to parents' literacy. This impact is differentiated rather than linear, and it is evident through different domains of everyday family life. On the children's side, effective parental strategies to support schooling and plan educational trajectories to maximize their chances of crossing schooling processes inside a system that only eventually is sensitive to their cultural reality. Learning at the family–school boundary implies new roles and identities, which generate new relational dynamics, modifying parents and children's trajectories in the contexts of family, school, and community.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-18765-5_21
Full citation:
Barros Filho, D. (2015)., Learning at the family–school boundary: when new roles and identities are created, in G. Marsico, M. Ristum & A. C. De Souza Bastos (eds.), Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 295-308.
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