Parent-teacher Conferences - A Cultural Perspective
Author(s):
Dorit Tubin (submitting) Tamar Shuy (presenting)
Conference:
ECER 2016
Network:
14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Format:
Paper

Session Information

14 SES 05 A, Parent-teacher Conferences and School Climate

Paper Session

Time:
2016-08-24
13:30-15:00
Room:
OB-E1.17 (ALE 1)
Chair:
Tim Jay

Contribution

The parent-teacher conference, or “parents’ evening” as it is known in England (MacLure & Walker, 2000) and “parents' day” as it called in Israel, is a common occasion in many education systems (Markström, 2009; Minke & Anderson, 2003). For this conference, parents are invited to the school once or twice a year to meet their children's teachers and learn about the former’s academic, social and emotional functioning at school. As a recurring event, the parent-teacher conference promotes relations of inside and outside. According to the school, parents’ involvement is considered as supporting students’ achievement and strengthening home-school relationships. According to the parents, it is opportunity for bridging between cultures (Quiroz, Greenfield & Altchech, 1999) and enhancing the community’s common values (Epstein & Sheldon, 2002; Stevens & Tollafield, 2003). These two sides of school and community or teacher and parent are also nested in broader societal and cultural systems such as class (Weininger & Lareau, 2003), institution (Meyer, Scott & Deal, 1981), and the dominant culture (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). Our assumption is that some of the common characteristics of the parent-teacher conference are derived from these broader systems, and especially from the dominance culture.

Thus, our research objective is to better understand how aspects of the Israeli dominant culture are formed and reformed by parent-teacher interactions during the parents’ day. We employed Hofstede’s cultural theory as a theoretical framework, which claims that every society has a national culture that affects and is reflected in organizational behavior (Hofstede, 1997; Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005). According to this theory, all societies are exposed to common problems such as relating to authority, relationships between the individual and society, concepts of masculinity and femininity, and ways of dealing with uncertainty. The solutions for these main problems differ from country to country and together comprise the national culture. Much of this culture has been acquired in early childhood and becomes the mind’s “software” that is reflected both in personal life and the organizational sphere (Hofstede, 1997).

The national culture is of course only one layer of many others that program our mind, such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, region, etc. Thus, we have focused on the  Bourdieu's idea of dominant culture (Bourdieu, 1977), and have used the main problems initially found by Hofstede (power distance, individuality, masculinity, and uncertainty) to study aspects of the Israeli dominant culture and its reflection in the parent-teacher conference. This decision is based on three assumptions: (1) the values of the Israeli dominant culture affect the behavior of teachers and parents alike; (2) the studied schools were located in a middle-class neighborhood that usually reflects the dominant culture; and (3); as a publicly-funded organization the school is most likely to reflect the dominant culture for augmenting institutional legitimacy, which in turn ensures the flow of resources and increases the school’s prospects (Meyer, Scott & Deal, 1981). Thus, our research question is what aspects of the Israeli dominant culture are reflected in the parents' day routines and behaviors. Our findings can contribute to a better understanding of parent-teacher conference components and how to improve them. 

Method

Methodology – Observations and audio-recordings were conducted on 34 parent-teacher conferences (one of two such annual meetings) that took place in grades five and six (10-11 years old), in three Israeli elementary schools. The schools were chosen from 26 others in the town because of their similar size (approximately 700 students), sector (secular), and the students’ socio-economic background (middle-class). The meetings were selected based on the informed consent of both parents and teachers once they had learned about the study’s goal. The meetings lasted between 5 and 22 minutes, and were all conducted on the same day, with the same teacher at each school. Based on Hofstede (1997) we defined behaviors that reflect different cultural values such as respecting the teacher for high power distance, and keeping the time for high uncertainty avoidance. Then, using quantitative methods we selected, categorized, and placed each behavior in a different value category. To avoid bias toward the conceptual framework’s supportive evidence and to reduce researchers’ blindness to contextual aspects (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), we used each other’s critical review (one of us conducted 22 observations, and the other the remaining 12). Contradictions and different interpretations were discussed according to the data and literature until agreement was reached.

Expected Outcomes

As expected, we found repetitive behaviors at all schools and meetings that seem to reflect three significant values of the dominant Israeli culture: (1) Familiarity – the meeting was usually arranged in an informal manner with the teacher sitting at the same side of the table as the parents (53%), referring to each other by first names, and some of the students by their nickname, dealing with family issues of both the teachers (a child in the army) and the parents (sickness, new baby, holiday) that created a friendly atmosphere of the one big Israeli family; (2) Low power distance – parents that challenged the teacher’s profession and argued with the teacher, a teacher willing to play roles according to parents’ expectations (counselor, friend, second mother), and mutual behavior such as answering cellphones during the meeting and breaking in when someone else was speaking; (3) Controlled uncertainty avoidance - poor observance of the meeting time – no meeting started on time, and the wait lasted between 5-30 minutes, tolerance for diverse participants – only 55% mothers and only 30% fathers, raising subjects unexpectedly. Surprisingly, and despite the goal of informing the parents about their children’s learning, only minimum attention was found to be paid to academic achievement, and most of the time was devoted to social and emotional subjects. We conclude that although many of these practices seem to harm the parent-teacher conference’s espoused goals, at the same time they reproduced the Israeli dominant culture within the intimate meeting space. Thus the mutual expectations of teachers and parents are reaffirmed, and the school’s status as an appropriate educational organization is reconfirmed. Parents' day as a meeting point between inside and outside contributes to the participants’ learning as well as the school organizational learning abilities.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction, in J. Karabel & A.H. Halsey (Eds.) Power and Ideology in Education (pp. 487-511). New York: Oxford University Press. Epstein J.L. & Sheldon, S.B. (2002). Present and Accounted for: Improving Student Attendance through Family and Community Involvement. The Journal of Educational Research, 95(5), 308-318. Hofstede, G. (1997) Culture and Organizations. New-York: McGraw-Hill. Hofstede, G. & Hofstede, G. J. (2005) Culture and Organizations - Software of the Mind. New-York: McGraw-Hill. Hsieh, H. & Shannon, S.E. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277–1288. Maclure, M. & Walker, B.M. (2000) Disenchanted Evenings: The social organization of talk in parent-teacher consultations in UK secondary schools, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(1), 5-25. Markström, A.M. (2009). The Parent–Teacher Conference in the Swedish Preschool: a study of an ongoing process as a ‘pocket of local order’. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 10(2), 122-132. Meyer, J., Scott W.R., and Deal, T.E. (1981). Institutional and technical sources of organizational structure: Explaining the structure of educational organizations. In: Herman D. Stein (ed.), Organization and the Human Services, 151-78. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Minke, K.M. and Anderson K.J. (2003) Restructuring Routine Parent – Teacher Conferences: The Family – School Conference Model. The Elementary School Journal, 104(1), 49-69. Quiroz, B., Greenfield, P., & Altchech, M. (1999). Bridging cultures with a parent-teacher conference. Educational Leadership, 56(7), 68-70. Stevens, B.A. & Tollafield, A. (2003). Creating comfortable and productive parent/teacher conferences. Phi Delta Kappan, 84(7), 521-524. Weininger, E.B. & Lareau, A. (2003). Translating Bourdieu into the American context: the question of social class and family-school relations. Poetics, 31(5-6), 375–402.

Author Information

Dorit Tubin (submitting)
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Tamar Shuy (presenting)
Ben Gurion University
Beer Sheva

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