The performance of United States schools that serve English learners has been under greater scrutiny in the last few decades as the number of children of immigrant families increases. The expanded role of high stakes testing after the implementation of the No Child Left Behind federal legislation has also focused on the sub-groups of students who may not score at targeted levels, sometimes including English language learners. In response to this increased scrutiny curricula, instructional materials, and school reform movements have sought to target and “remediate” these sub-groups who score “below basic” on the mandated tests. Accordingly, how schools build connections with the families of English learners has also received increased attention. The literature of school-family connection has expanded greatly in recent years, including literature specifically addressing the connections with Latino immigrant parents which in many states form the largest immigrant group. Many studies in this literature is often written from traditional perspectives of American education research, or looking at school practices which reach out to immigrant parents.

There are fewer studies which reflect the immigrant parents' experience of schools. The intent of this dissertation study is to use a participatory action research methodology to give a group of ten Mexican immigrant parents the space to explore with each other certain elements of their experience of schools. In this model the parents shift from objects of study to subjects of study. In group dialogic inquiry their own personal experience when shared becomes the foundation for collective intersubjective understandings about the possible disconnections they experience with schools.

The themes addressed in the group inquiry, or simposio, were generated from individual interviews with the parents. The study focused on two research questions. First, how do these parents experience their children's schools, how what they experienced with schools in Mexico is contrasted with their experience in the US, and what insights are shared in their group inquiry. The findings to this question are largely constituted from the parents' discussions, including ideas about the use of Spanish in schools, the form of school-home communication, and questions of cultural expectation, presumptions, and dislocations. The second questions explores how groups like the inquiry groups can best serve immigrant parents who report feeling isolated from other parents. This question leads to a meta-analysis of potential spaces for such parents, including ideas of thirdspace and Habermas' communicative action in the idealized public sphere.