Stages of Immigrant Parent Involvement-Survivors to Leaders: Meeting Immigrant Parents on Their Own Terms Is the Optimal Way to Foster Parent Engagement and Thus Student Achievement

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In a diverse school district, family liaisons help immigrant parents understand and apply for free and reduced-price meals served at the school. At another school, an interpreter at a school orientation event helps immigrants learn about school bus transportation--neither the parents nor their children have ever seen or taken a school bus in their home country. In another school neighborhood, bilingual parents receive training on school and district policies and procedures so they can provide insights for the school and share the information with others in their cultural community. At an elementary school where the majority of students are from Latino homes, immigrant parents serve as PTA leaders, running their meetings in Spanish and providing interpreters for English-speaking parents. Immigrant families are not all alike nor are their needs or interests. These families come to the U.S. from diverse backgrounds with a wide range of needs and prior educational experiences. One parent may not be literate in his/her native language, while another parent may have several years of formal education. Some immigrant parents may have acquired educational levels equivalent to a Ph.D. in their country. Language proficiency also varies. Some may not speak English; others may come from countries such as Nigeria, where English is the national language. An immigrant who works in a specialized field, such as science or technology, may be fluent in English but have a spouse with little knowledge of English or U.S. culture. These cultural and linguistic differences pose challenges to schools that want to engage parents in their children's education. To support immigrant families in acclimating to a new school community and to help them become valued partners with the school, educators first must understand who these families are, their needs, and how schools can bridge the linguistic and cultural gaps between homes and schools. To gain insights about parent involvement, many educators have turned to general parent involvement models that describe different ways parents interact with school. But these models do not adequately describe the unique factors affecting immigrant parents. A new model based on the experiences of U.S. immigrants from all over the world provides educators and community leaders with insights that help them tailor programs and services to support these families as they acclimate into U.S. school culture. This model--called the Stages of Immigrant Parent Involvement--illustrates that parents' needs, skills, and interests evolve as he or she moves through the stages of Cultural Survivor, Cultural Learner, Cultural Connector, and Cultural Leader (Han, 2012). Understanding these stages better equips educators to identify where families are as well as their unique challenges and helps schools determine how to best support them. Cultural Survivors face multiple challenges, and their priority is meeting their family's basic needs. Parents in this stage may be recently arrived immigrants or refugees escaping political unrest or seeking religious freedom. They might be illiterate in their native language and need to work multiple jobs in order to maintain the basic needs of food and shelter. With their long hours of work, cultural survivors tend to have very little time, if any, to learn about the U.S. school system and how to navigate it. Cultural Learners are more comfortable with the new school culture and the U.S. education system. They are engaged in learning about the schools--instruction, curriculum, assessment, school culture, and more. With the help of qualified and trained interpreters and translated documents, parents communicate with schools and learn to navigate the U.S. school system. They feel more comfortable attending workshops in their native language and are likely to participate in parent-teacher conferences with language support. …