What Can Parents Tell Us About Poverty and Literacy Learning? Listening to Parents Over Time

In this article, the authors use Bourdieu's conceptualization of capital and data from two longitudinal case studies to explore how financial challenges impacted learning opportunities for two children in a high-poverty urban community. Interview data collected from two African American families over a 10-year period were analyzed with attention to the role of economic academic capital (resources and experiences that require financial investment and translate to school success) in children's school trajectories. Findings revealed that the families' homes, schools, and community lacked economic academic capital and that this dearth had dire consequences for the children's academic careers. However, the families could access other forms of capital, namely, embodied academic capital and social academic capital. These findings point to the important role that teachers can play when they act as advocates for students from low-income backgrounds and their parents when they encounter educational and economic barriers.