About the Lab
Research conducted in the United States documents that young Latino and African-American children disproportionately lack the school readiness skills needed to successfully transition to kindergarten relative to their White peers. Parents, as children’s “first teachers,” play an important role in supporting their preschooler’s school readiness through early practices. Until recently, there has been a tendency to assume that children from low-income and ethnically-linguistically diverse families came from homes that were educationally impoverished. In these homes, families did not value school, possessed few learning materials, engaged in few school readiness practices, and overall did not support or care about their child’s education. This belief or assumption largely lies in the notion of deficit thinking, which diminishes the culturally specific and resourceful ways that diverse families engage with their children. Rather than focusing on family deficits, the DFSRL at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) works on projects that emphasize families’ subcultural strengths and highlights how parents are proactively involved with their children in their daily lives through a family resilience lens. We embrace a family systems perspective and explore how families demonstrate strength, agency, resourcefulness, and problem-solving skills in their own right as they promote their children’s school readiness.
Funding
Our work is supported by the College of Education Dean’s Office Collaborative Community Grant at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP) Faculty Fellowship.