Uplifting the Voices of Asian American Parents Through an Online Family Book Club: Elicited and Silenced Cultural Knowledge

This ethnographic case study explores how parents participating in reading experiences influenced children's responses to culturally relevant texts. I focus on six Chinese American families who participated in an online family book club. The children were between the ages of four and six and spoke both English and Chinese Mandarin. In each session, the families listened to an interactive read-aloud, participated in a family book discussion after reading, and shared a question/connection with the group. The data included transcribed video-recordings, transcripts of the family's book discussions, and transcripts of interviews conducted with the families. These data were analyzed using Nexus Analysis and grounded coding methods. Findings showed that parents fostered connections between the child, the book, and their own relationship to the book. These connections reflected heritage culture, family history, and family experiences. The parents shaped the children's reading experience and cultural knowledge by building on and extending existing cultural knowledge, redirecting children to attend to new cultural knowledge, choosing not to address certain types of cultural knowledge, utilizing home resources, and cultivating intercultural awareness and language learning. This study has implications for teachers and educators who want to engage parents in supporting children's cultural knowledge.