Chapter 4: The Parental Representations about their Children First Literacy Acquisition: A Case Study in a Small Italian Town

Within a sociocultural approach (Cole, 1996), the issue of relationships between school and family has received attention from within different sections of educational psychology (cf. Marsico et al., 2013). In this academic field, we want to provide a contribution to the further analysis of the boundary crossing between school and family spaces. In particular, the present chapter focuses on the parental representations of children’s literacy acquisition during the first primary grade. The corpus of data consists of 16 interviews with low and high social class parents living in a small town in Italy. The issues addressed in the interviews concern parental ideas about children’s literacy, the type of help they provide to children’s homework, and the use of school practices within the family context. The interviews are analyzed through an inductive method within a sociocultural perspective, in order to highlight how the issue of first literacy development is considered relevant particularly by parents who are not fully literate. The findings highlight the connection between positive parental representations of first primary grade school and literacy development. Participant parents agree that the main value of school education is to make acquaintances with very different people, and to develop good social skills.