School entry constitutes a period of transition for the child, but also for the whole family, especially for the eldest child of the family. Parents are not “only” parents anymore, they become parents of a pupil and have to endorse a new role. Zittoun (2012) considers that transitions imply a dynamic process of change and development which involves three types of processes: learning, identity change and meaning construction. These processes include the appropriation and the negotiation of new roles. It is during this uncertain time of transition that the basis of the relation between school and family are established. In this early phase, small adjustments can suffice to make a difference in the long run (Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 2000). Parents and teachers are nowadays encouraged to build a partnership, since the quality of their relation is seen as contributing to the school success of the child (Henderson & Mapp, 2002). Nevertheless, this call for partnership can turn around against the families which are more distant from school culture and unfamiliar with the codes and practices of the school (Périer, 2005). School entry is thus a key moment of negotiation between the family culture and the school culture, involving complex negotiations of meaning, role and identity (for oneself and for the other), which are performed in the interactions.

In a current ethnographical study supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), we are investigating in an urban Swiss school how the relation between the school and the families builds up in its very first moments. We consider the relation between school and families as resulting from communication processes taking place notably in everyday interactions between the teachers and the families. Since this relation brings together the school and the family cultures, which can be more or less distant and therefore can facilitate or complicate the construction of the relation, we analyse these communication processes in an intercultural communication perspective (Frame, 2013).

In this contribution, we investigate how teachers and parents understand, appropriate and negotiate their respective roles in their first interactions. We analyse in particular the appropriation and negotiation processes in everyday and informal interactions taking place during what Marcel (2002) calls “interstitial moments”, when parents accompany their children to school. These interactions, in which teachers and families appropriate and negotiate their roles, take place in a defined space which also plays a role in the developing relation (Frame, 2013). We put special emphasis on how the architectural space and its use by the actors influence their understanding and negotiation of their respective roles. Architecture can contribute to quality of the relation between parents and teachers; it can also create or maintain distance between them. Our interest is not limited to the “real” space, where the interactions take place physically, we also consider the “imagined” space, namely how the interactants understand the space and its use prior, during and after the interactions (Cettou & Ogay, 2013). A special focus is set on the frontage analysis (Soulier, 2012), the land between the front of a building and the street, where everyday interactions are occurring. Hence, we combine interactional, communicational and spatial perspectives to analyse how teachers and parents negotiate and redefine their roles in that space and time at the frontier (Segaud, 2008) of the school and family worlds.

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