College-Sponsored Lecture to Discuss Challenges of Preschool Immigrant Children

by Joe Savrock (October 2009)

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Joseph Tobin, the Nadine Mathis Basha Professor of Early Childhood Education at Arizona State University, will present a lecture titled “Listening to the Voices of Immigrant Parents in Early Childhood Education.” The event, free to the public, will be held Monday, Nov. 9, beginning at 4:30 p.m. in Foster Auditorium of Pattee Library on Penn State's University Park campus.

Tobin is leader of the Children Crossing Borders project, a study of approaches to working with the children of recent immigrants in preschools in five countries. In this project, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from England, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States are studying the perspectives of immigrant parents and staff members on what should happen in preschools serving children of recent immigrants. The research method is a version of the video-cued multivocal ethnographic approach that Tobin employed in his Preschool in Three Cultures studies.

In his talk, Tobin will show clips from videos his team made in preschool classrooms in each country and present examples of practitioner, immigrant parent, and child reflections on these videos. He will use these examples to demonstrate the challenges of listening to the voices of immigrant parents, to point out tensions between a dedication to progressive practices and a concern for cultural responsiveness, and to suggest some ways to resolve these tensions through a process of parent-staff cultural negotiation.

Tobin is author of a number of books, including Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States; Making a Place for Pleasure in Early Childhood Education; Good Guys Don’t Wear Hats: Children’s Talk about the Media; and Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokemon. His newest book, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited, was published earlier this year.

The talk is co-sponsored by the following Penn State units: the Dean’s Office of the College of Education, the Curriculum and Instruction Department, the Education Policy Studies Department, the Education and Behavioral Sciences Library, and the College of Education’s Diversity and Community Enhancement Committee.

For more information about the lecture, contact Gail Boldt. Any persons needing special accommodations or those with questions about physical access should contact Karla Schmit in advance by e-mail or phone (814-863-5521).