This paper is an exploratory study of the childhood academic language environments (CALEs) of bilingual Japanese expatriate students. Student (n 028) and parent (n067) surveys were adapted from the Life History Calendar (Caspi et al. 1996) to gather retrospective CALE data at a JapaneseÁEnglish bilingual high school. Principal Components Analysis was conducted to derive three underlying CALE components, each representing educational intervention strategies. These three components were comprised of primary loadings that depict the respective aspects of the Japanese transnational experience with their children's supplementary education during their overseas sojourns and reveal families' needs for: L1 maintenance communities, L2 acquisition support, and a means to convert their children's bilingual skills into academic credentials that are adequate for both L1 and L2 contexts. Principal components were thus interpreted as sojourning families' three approaches to environmental structuring: a Japanese Cultural Community Approach, a Quasi-Bilingual Approach, and a Japanese Test-oriented Approach. Implications are drawn, both for the sojourning community and for future research needs.
PurposeGiven the less mature homeschooling ecosystem in China, together with the similarity of purpose, the current study examined the lived experiences of curricular choice making in the USA and China and categories of respective families (homeschools), as a way of understanding curricular flexibility. In addressing these features, based on an updated model of curricular flexibility as it applies to homeschooling, the authors examined the aspects of who, what, when, where and how to see if this context offers new light. The authors then consider ways in which the model can be further updated for greater analytical clarity and accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive case study was conducted in the Xi'an city of China and the Seattle metropolitan area of the USA. A survey and two rounds of semi-structured interview data were collected from ten homeschooling families in both contexts.FindingsThe study found families’ adjusted curricula for different motives, as they navigated differing societal contexts, and curricular flexibility in homeschooling contexts was theorized as standardization and structuring strategies and social dimensions, and family preference patterns were identified. Chinese homeschooling families had comparatively less variety of available resources and freedom to homeschools compared to American counterparts, and they operated with the awareness of a standard national curriculum and its social implications.Originality/valueThis study elaborates on a little-discussed topic – the overall curriculum of each homeschool and motives influencing changing curricular choices during the process of homeschooling. And it is the first paper to use the model to explicitly define curricular flexibility in the homeschooling context, thus extending the existing theoretical discussion of curricular flexibility.
A qualitative inquiry in four Early Head Start Research sites explored the question of how lowincome mothers and fathers view the role of fathers in their families. Role perceptions were gathered from a total of 56 parents of infants and toddlers across the four sites, using multiple data collection methods that included focus groups, open-ended interviews, and one case study. The data were analyzed to identify common themes across sites. The participants identifi ed roles that included: providing fi nancial support, "being there," care giving, outings and play, teaching and discipline, providing love, and protection. Implications of these qualitative fi ndings are discussed with respect to their relationship to current theoretical frameworks about father roles. Further, these fi ndings shed light on the question of whether low-income families view parenting roles as being relatively discrete (i.e., separate or "traditional" functions of mothers and fathers), or whether they view their roles in a more blended, co-parenting perspective. RESUMEN: Una investigación cualitativa en cuatro lugares de investigación de "Early Head Start," exploró la pregunta de cómo las madres y los padres de bajos recursos económicos ven el papel que ellos tienen dentro de sus familias. Se reunio´ información sobre la percepción de su función dentro de la familia, de
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.