LATINO FAMILIES INVOLVEMENT IN THEIR CHILDREN’S MATHEMATICS EDUCATION

This study is grounded on a sociocultural perspective and focuses on the role of Latino families in their children’s mathematical learning. Through parents ’ voices we explore possible ways of inclusion that may allow for Latino families to overcome social and educational exclusion. Latino mothers explain strategies to counteract this exclusion using resources they find in their communities. This study focuses on Latino families ’ involvement in their children’s mathematics teaching and learning. Our goal in this paper is to try to understand the nature of this involvement from a sociocultural point of view. Through parents ’ voices we explore possible ways of inclusion that may allow Latino families to overcome social and educational exclusion. We examine the kinds of strategies that Latino mothers in our study used to overcome some of the barriers that affect their children’s learning of mathematics. Theoretical Framework Drawing from the sociocultural approach (Cobb & Yackel, 1996; Nasir & Hand, 2006), we assume that learning is a social and cultural phenomenon that cannot be understood only through the analysis of cognitive processes, but also it is a process in which contextua