Session Information
07 SES 04 A, Challenges in Responding to Cultural Diversity
Paper Session
Time:
2009-09-28
16:00-17:30
Room:
HG, HS 31
Chair:
Chris Gaine
Contribution
This project is part of the current Danish research project “School-home cooperation as a cultural given?”
On the basis of material from an ethnographic fieldwork in five different urban families, who have in common that one of their children attend cero grade in school, I examine the process of relating home and school.
My analytical focus is children and their parents´ different attitudes, experiences, resources and strategies and their unequal conditions of being recognised and feeling heard and included as school-families.
The five families differ according to family structure, relations to the labour market and the educational system. They all live in the same local area, they are all white ethnic Danes, they live in apartments and all five children attend the same school. I visited the families frequently, participated in journeys between home and school, in parents meetings, in social events at school and in the children’s schooldays where I also had conversations with the teachers.
My preliminary analyses show that children and parents understand and manage children’s interests differently, relate differently to teachers and their communications, relate differently to other children and their parents, and have different ways to handle dissatisfaction. These differences reflect simultaneously unequal visibility, unequal access to the teachers, unequal influence on one’s child’s schooling and everyday life in the school, teacher’s unequal distribution of recognition, and parents unequal feelings of being included and heard.
I will elaborate on these analytical connections between differences and inequalities and frame the analysis by Bourdieus’ concept of capital and Skeggs’ (2000, 2004)theoretical discussion of class (Bourdieu, 1987, 1990, 1995). The elaborated analysis will also be inspired by Annette Lareau (2003) , Gill Crozier, Diane Reay and Carol Vincent ( 2005) who have worked in the field of families and schools from a perspective of social inequalities.
In continuation of their contributions I ask which kind of capitals are powerful in the specific processes of home-school relations and how social forces such as class and gender are activated and reproduced when the actors of the homes and the actors of the school interact in everyday life?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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