This dissertation presents a qualitative study that features in-depth interviews conducted in homes and the application of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to understand the discourses of Hispanic parents. Observing moments of dialogue between parents and children who participated in some interviews served to understand how parents attempted to influence their children's development of beliefs and values about language and identity. The study examined transcripts of narratives produced by Hispanic parents in 12 families in Arizona and Iowa, most of them immigrants from Mexico whose children were attending primary grades in two public schools. The purpose of the study was to understand the ideological dimensions of parental involvement in education and their socialization practices.The theoretical framework can be described as a sociocultural approach to family, identity and ideology, combined with a critical perspective on language socialization. This sociocultural framework is influenced by Vygotsky's (1927/1997) cultural-historical theory, which provided the lens to look at the cognitive aspects involved in the reproduction of ideologies, and by diverse versions of CDA as formulated by other scholars, such as Fairclough (1995), Gee (2004), and van Dijk (1998). CDA was used to analyze conversational storytelling and argumentation about controversial topics such as bilingual education, the maintenance of Spanish as heritage language, identity, English-only instruction, and official English movements in US. This approach (CDA) was particularly useful to examine texts with reported speech to understand the representation of other people's discourses and of the groups they represent.The findings provide insights into experiences that would affect children's motivation to learn and use Spanish and English, paying attention to processes of ideological influence from diverse sources upon parents' and children's beliefs and attitudes toward those languages. This study has implications for language and educational policies because its findings inform educators about parents' experiences and their perspectives on the education of language minority students. The study is useful to understand not only the parents' perspectives on the education of Hispanic children, but also the ideological dimension of parental involvement in education, especially when the latter includes language socialization of their children towards promoting the development of bilingualism and biliteracy.

When teachers are charged with educating students that are racially, culturally, or economically different from them, they may have little information on the culture and type of family involvement of their students. This lack of information contributes to perceptions of working-class families as socially disorganized and intellectually deficient. However, research embodying the theoretical framework funds of knowledge (FoK) attempts to counter deficient models through its assertion that all families possess extensive bodies of knowledge that have developed through social, historical, political, and economic contexts. The primary purpose of this study was to carefully examine Hispanic parents’ support of young children’s early literacy development in the home. The knowledge gleaned from an initial study of home support, by spending time in the home of a Hispanic family provided an avenue for action research in the classroom. A second purpose was to determine if the introduction of FoK ways of learning, when applied in the classroom, had an effect on early literacy skills. In addition, I maintained a journal that chronicled my experiences and led to an autoethnographic study of myself as a transforming white, female, prekindergarten teacher. The results indicated that the family possessed extensive FoK developed through historical, cultural, educational, and social experiences. Results further indicate that introduction of these familial FoK improved the oral language skills of prekindergarten students thus enhancing their early literacy development. Autoethnographic results indicate a personal progression toward not only understanding, but becoming an advocate, for the Hispanic population.

Parenting self-efficacy refers to the ability of parents to have confidence in their abilities to effectively parent their children. Parenting self-efficacy can be divided into two types: (a) general parenting self-efficacy, which is defined as a parent’s overall sense of ability to effectively parent; and (b) task-specific parenting self-efficacy, which is defined as a parent’s confidence level to perform specific parenting tasks, such as teaching and nurturing (tested in this study). The study applied Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory to an analysis of (a) the effect of the HIPPY program in interaction with family and neighborhood variables on parenting self-efficacy and (b) the effect of the interaction of family and neighborhood variables on parenting self-efficacy. A group of 138 HIPPY mothers and a group of 76 comparison mothers who did not receive HIPPY services were surveyed. The sample was largely Hispanic. Results indicated HIPPY predicts task-specific parenting self-efficacy for teaching tasks, but not general parenting self-efficacy or task-specific efficacy for nurturance. Many family variables that reflected Hispanic family values were unique predictors of all three types of parenting self-efficacy, both in analyses involving interactions with HIPPY and with neighborhood variables. Neighborhood variables solely predicted general parenting self-efficacy. Moderation effects were found for the interaction between family conflict and neighborhoods in predicting general parenting self-efficacy, and the interactions between family control and all three types of parenting self-efficacy. Overall, the bioecological model was inapplicable to urban, Hispanic mothers in the surveyed population because of the lack of interaction effects found in the study.