Building School-Family Partnerships in a South Bronx Classroom. The Series on Cultural Interchange.

This publication examines a study of cultural exchange within a fifth grade classroom, presenting case studies of three children and their families and the relationships they developed with the teacher, the ethnographer, and the school community. The study examined teachers, students, and families who drew lessons from interacting with one another and using those lessons to improve and enrich the ways in which they approached the world. Researchers examined interchange in the classrooms and school communities, focusing on occasions when students brought their cultural perspectives into the collective discourse or teachers represented their own world views or the knowledge of institutional culture, their sense of school, to students or families. The school under study was located in a very poor district, and most of the students were Hispanic or African American. After regularly observing one fifth grade classroom and visiting with students and families, the researcher concluded that each student had a unique story, though in most of the stories, the process of interchange unfolded in a similar pattern (setting the stage, building trust relationships, getting to know each other, building bridges, and self-expression at school). The process of cultural exchange did not proceed nearly as far with some students as it did with others. (Contains 32 references.) (SM)