ABSTRACT
The voices of these African American mothers are filled with passion and pain as they talk about their children’s schooling experiences. Their stories demonstrate just how different the subjective experiences of African American parents and teachers can be, and that parents’ and teachers’ perceptions about home-school relationships, literacy, and schooling can indeed be “worlds apart” (Lightfoot, 1978, p. 170). Bridging the gap between the worlds of African American parents and the world of school is an essential goal, because this enables parents and teachers to work together as partners in the educational lives of African American children. Parent involvement is a cornerstone to literacy achievement and success in school, because “children who have more opportunities to engage in literacyrelevant activities at home have more positive views about reading, engaging in
more leisure reading, and have better reading achievement” (Baker & Scher, 2002, p. 240), Parents who are involved in their children’s schooling also garner positive benefits; they often become more aware of the influence that they have on their children’s educational achievement, and they develop greater capacity to help their children practice school-based literacy skills at home (Epstein, 1995; Gadsden, Ray, Jacobs, & Gwak, 2006). In turn, teachers who communicate positively with African American parents learn to recognize the cultural and familial resources that African American children bring into classrooms, and are able to effectively build upon these resources to teach reading and writing in schools (Edwards, Pleasants, & Franklin, 1999).
