Sarai Coba-Rodriguez

My systematic program of research focuses on contributing to the limited research on school readiness and family involvement among low-income Latino and African-American families, including their beliefs and practices that promote young children’s successful transition to kindergarten. I further consider how to enrich the partnership between homes and schools to enhance child competencies upon kindergarten entry. I use a family resilience framework to guide my research because I view families as a system and consider how they collectively thrive, despite adversity. This framework emphasizes a family’s strength and cultural resources, challenging the notion of “dysfunction” and “deficit,” by highlighting family’s agency in promoting their children’s school readiness. By focusing on family processes, my qualitative research offers a first-person perspective that values participants voices, recognizes cultural variation, documents heterogeneity, and identifies resilience.