**6.4 Research as growth**

*Parenting - Studies by an Ecocultural and Transactional Perspective*

community-based cohorts is a way for women to learn skills and build capacities, increase self-esteem, develop agency in accessing information and resources, and promote collective action and community organizing. Learning parenting skills can lead to opportunities to enter the workforce in early childhood and education, which has shown to align culturally and religiously in many refugee communities. This combination of family, social, and economic empowerment positions women as leaders and decision-makers in their households and communities. It is important to recognize that a sole focus on economic empowerment is steeped in the capitalistic misogynistic structures of our society. Parenting is part of human development, part of our human curriculum. Perhaps parenting education focused on growth and self awareness and family decision-making can assist in breaking down the oligarchical structures stemming from colonial and capitalistic societal underpinnings. Parenting is unpaid work that contributes to every society. It includes the direct and indirect care of people. The care is primarily provided by women, and also to varying degrees provided by girls, men and boys. This unpaid work has a negative impact on gender gaps and the person's ability to participate fully in the economy of employment [88, 89]. Parenting is a way to support empowerment of women and the rest of the family by addressing the unequal distribution and decision making in unpaid work. It can also provide an opportunity for women to enter the workforce. Many times women who have children are discriminated against in that the woman needs to be available about 4 hours each day to nurse the baby. It is difficult to measure this cost, however, it has been shown that there is a cost savings of \$3.1 billion in health care costs. In addition, the women that work in salaried positions are more able to stop and pump milk for the baby than women in hourly positions, which most women who are refugees can more readily access. A social ecological model is necessary to analyze the complexities of the cultural and contextual lived experience of women who are refugees. Parenting education is part of our community outreach and advocacy response to the refugee parents and families we work with as an element of an ecological system of restorative and healing responses that are culturally and

Participants' engagement in the analysis process guided what indicators were important and what to consider in terms of interventions and adjustments to the project. Many studies involving refugees use more traditional methods of analysis that focus on countering and mitigating deficits (PTSD for example) rather than focusing on how to nurture and cultivate strengths (resilience, agency, and empowerment). The participatory analysis process capitalizes on the participants' knowledge and abilities to overcome the challenges they have faced. It is a process of seeking ways to support people's ability to integrate their multiple identities and cultures. We believe that the participatory methods built capacity with the research team members and cohort members and helped engage the donors for funding to expand their project and begin new cohorts.. Capacity building was not hierarchically organized, rather it was multidimensional, with peer learning at its center. Many of the analysis discussions went beyond the study or project. The discussion included ways to include family members, husbands, and to deepen understanding such as including husbands and male family members in play with the children, including Imams from the local mosque to support the importance of intentional and attentional child rearing practices, addressing not

only traditional and cultural values, but also the stressors children face.

Interestingly, the academic partner participants seemed to be the most hesitant and least flexible in terms of viewing participatory analysis as valid. However, by the end, the academic partner participants were on board and recognized that the learning and transformation would not have been as meaningful, relevant, nor extensive had participatory analysis not been used. This was evidence that the academic partners' growth and capacity building as a result of the study. Participatory

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contextually appropriate [90].

Finally, the authors wish to express gratitude for the privilege of working with these remarkable women. Through a deconstruction/reconstruction, self-reflective process, our intellect, our hearts and our compassion expanded. We learned that only through on-going dialectical interaction with people from the culture we were studying, did we begin to understand the profound impact of being able to hold different symbolic cultures as valid and true at the same time, even when in contradiction with each other. Some of the cultural challenges included the semantics of words and phrases in terms of culture values, meaning, and communication. As we started to code the data and discover patterns or deviances in the stories gathered, we were surprised at the abundant patterns of power imbalance, gender bias, and hidden histories. These are all themes that speak to the importance of heart and healing in research. As society continues to become increasingly multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural, we need educators who know how to support young children's development and learning by providing culturally relevant pedagogy that increases knowledge and love of self and others. In this way we work towards building a society with the knowledge and skills needed to live together respectfully and stand up to ignorance, prejudice, and discrimination. "Apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other" [52, 73].
