What does education mean for us and how do we get involved? Parents’ accounts in a Mexican rural community

This research focuses on parental involvement in their children’s education in a Mexican rural community. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural reproduction, the key concepts under investigation were field, habitus, social, cultural and symbolic capital. From an ethnographic perspective, data were collected through a variety of research methods in the autumn of 2005. I managed to interact closely with participants in order to investigate their attitudes, knowledge and practices with respect to the formal and informal education in their own and their children’s lives.The values they transmitted to their children were also important objects of study. Investigating parents’ background and their interaction with the community school was crucial in order to understand their constraints in getting involved in their children’s education. The paper analyses parents’ satisfaction with the provision of formal education in their community and, families’ limitations in getting involved. It also illustrates that parental involvement was regarded mainly as a mothers’ task. The relevance of this study relies on the attempt to test Bourdieu’s theory in an area that has been generally under-explored as is the case of parental involvement in rural settings