Parents with No or Limited Formal Schooling in Mexico

Cultural Literacy Practices and Imagined Futures of Parents with No or Low Levels of Formal Schooling: Parents and Children's Perspectives

Principal Investigator: Mario Lopez Gopar, Universidad Autonma Benito Juarez de Oaxaca

Oaxaca has the highest alphabetic illiteracy level in Spanish of the country. Many Indigenous families move from rural communities to low-SES urban neighborhoods in order to provide their children with more schooling opportunities. As they move from their places of origin, those parents construct imagined futures for their children. The purpose of this research is two-fold: (1) to document the cultural literacy practices of parents with no or low-levels (first grade of elementary school) of formal schooling from both the parents' and their children's perspectives; (2) and to relate these cultural literacy practices to the imagined futures for/of the children constructed by the parents and the children.