– Parental involvement at MANOS was important in order to bridge home-school relationships based on linguistic differences, social class, or citizenship. With the confianza of mentors, parents alienated by their children’s schools and the English language could directly come into contact with the language without institutional scrutiny.
– Community organizations offering collaborative mentoring to families must take a Vygotskian approach of establishing “zones of proximal development of language brokering that are dynamic and shifting. Children and parents mutually scaffold each other’s learning in these cases, and they advance their skills together” (Orellana 104).
– MANOS mentors modeled the sociocultural learning practices of mentorship by helping children with homework as parents observed and also actively participated, while also modeling some of the skills they learned. The literacy session for the children became as well a site of parental development. This reinforced literacy practices modeled by mentors or instructors.
Brokering Literacies 