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[Review of the book Children crossing borders: Immigrant parent and teacher perspectives on preschool]

Description:
Tobin, Arzubiaga and Adair invite us to listen carefully to the forgotten voices of our very essential members in the field of early childhood education: immigrant parents and teachers. The book is relevant in our current context of early childhood education because the population of immigrant children in the USA is on the rise. Thus, the needs to better serve preschool immigrant children are the very reality of today's US preschools. The authors describe the urgency of this issue: "One in four children under age six in the United States has at least one immigrant parent and speaks a language other than English at home". Despite these increasing needs of immigrant children and families, the authors explain that many directors of the preschools and teachers in the study feel unprepared to work with them. Throughout the book, the authors encourage readers to position themselves as learners, and to attempt to learn from immigrant parents and teachers, whose voices have often been marginalized in the field of education. The purpose of the book, emanating from the larger research study Children Crossing Borders, which was initiated together and collaborated with researchers in England, France, Germany, Italy, and the USA, is to bridge the gap between preschools and immigrant parents so that they join together to achieve educational goals for immigrant children. The authors invoke this purpose by stating that preschools are commonly the first site "where the immigrant's culture of home meets the culture of the host society", and bring the issue to light through discussions of different themes in the book. The book is organized into six chapters, where the first two chapters introduce the intersection of immigration and early childhood education and the research context and methods, respectively. Videocued multivocal ethnography was used as a research method and, as part of it, focus group interviews were conducted across the USA, including in Phoenix, New York, Nashville, Riverdale, and Nuevo Campo (Riverdale and Nuevo Campo are pseudonyms). The rest of the chapters discuss the main themes that resulted in the research study, including curriculum, language, identity, and facilitating dialogue. (author abstract)
Resource Type:
Book Reviews
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