Voices of administrators serving Latino communities : a multisite video-cued ethnography

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to better understand how administrators characterize high-quality early learning classrooms predominantly serving Latino/a and Latino/a immigrant students. The study was guided by a single research question: How do school and district administrators serving Latino immigrant communities describe how young children should learn in early grades (Pre-kindergarten-third)? The study drew from two theoretical perspectives: socio-cultural and politics of education. I relied on the work of Gee’s cultural models and storylines, Bakhtin’s dialogism and heteroglassia, and Gutierrez and Rogoff repertoires of practice to help me understand the participants’ answers to my research question. I also used a political perspective as an alternative of seeing, interpreting, and explaining what goes on in an [educational] organization (Iannaccone, 1991). I relied on the logic of action as a focal point to understand the answers given by the participants to my research question. This study was part of a larger comparative video-cued ethnographic project called the Agency and Young Children Project. The research design for this study followed the methodology used by Joe Tobin and colleagues in their study of Preschool in Three Cultures and Children Crossing Borders (Tobin, Wu, Davidson, 1989; Tobin, Wu, Karasawa, 2009; Tobin, Arzubiaga, & Adair, 2013). This study used video-cued ethnography to provide a detailed, in depth description of the cultural knowledge and perspectives of a social group (Geertz, 1970). My study revealed three prominent themes related to early learning: (a) administrators’ perspectives on pedagogy of early learning; (b) administrators’ perspectives on learning environments of early childhood classrooms; and, (c) administrators’ perspectives on influential factors on early learning classrooms.