| This dissertation examines the thought processes of immigrant families as they are faced with the decisions of placing their children in bilingual education classes or English immersion classrooms. By examining this phenomena of what is involved and considered by families when they are making these decisions, we can began to understand the conceptual and emotional scope families are faced with as they confront the expectations public schools place not only on their children, but on themselves as well.;The research took place during the public school year, when classes were in session and participants were actively involved and engaged in school activities. This qualitative, grounded theory study used social, critical, and radical constructivist lenses to focus on meaning while furthering interpretive understanding of the data collected through interviews, conversations, observations, field notes, peer discussions, written and tape recorded reflections. The emergent themes were centered within the primary emotional concepts of struggle, progress, and self-fear. The findings in this study coincide with current research, schools are placing their children in bilingual classrooms, but immigrant parents are overriding the schools decisions even though they struggle to move their children to English immersion classrooms. Immigrant parents do this for two reasons: educacion is about deportment, not about the disciplinary knowledge and they see English proficiency as a ticket to the big house, the good job and the freedom from struggle. They do not understand disciplinary knowledge because they have no experience with it. The solutions to the negative impact of the hegemony of English only policies is to establish "centers" where parents have access to tools (cameras, VCRs, cell phones, etc.) that allow them to create knowledge materials without judgment in their own languages; provide ways, through Internet and telephone technologies, to share their knowledge materials with geographically-dispersed family and friends, a kind of "virtual kiosk" of information about education, content, success, and different teaching and learning options. |
