Despite the value attributed to home-school collaboration (Sarier, 2016) and specifically to School-Parent-Meetings (SPM) (Lemmer, 2012), previous literature suggests that prevalent practice is far from meeting the stakeholders’ demands (Balkar, 2009). Both parents and educators agree on the need for improving SPMs as an extension of home-school collaboration (Özgan & Aydın, 2010). Çalışkan and Ayık (2015) remark ineffective SPMs as one of the reasons explaining parents’ disinclination toward schools. While parents complain how these meetings are structured and organized (Gedik, 2018), educators complain about parents’ inattentiveness to the present meetings and their lack of support for schools (Çınkır & Nayır, 2017), without making the necessary effort to turn the situation around (Erdoğan & Demirkasımoğlu, 2010).

Traditional conceptions of SPMs and school–centric perspectives may overlook the ways that parents can involve and act in SPMs. Building on the critical PI literature, the purpose of this study is to explore school-based structures and practices that prevent authentic parental involvement in school–parent–meetings. To this end, one main research question will guide this study: what are the school-based (exclusive) structures and practices that prevent authentic parental involvement in school–parent–meetings?

To answer this question, the researcher intends to focus on how schools organize SPMs; how these meetings look like; what topics are discussed in these meeting and in which manner they are discussed; what kinds of involvement opportunities parents are presented with; and finally, what aspects of these meetings are empowering or disempowering particular parents.

This study focuses on school leadership (at the school level), its influence on the school environment and more specifically on SPMs. Literature shows that school leadership plays a central role in establishing effective home-school collaborations (Ferguson, 2005), creating inclusive school cultures and promoting home-school partnerships for diverse communities (DeMatthews et al., 2016). Using a social justice leadership framework, this study builds on the attributes of social justice leadership related to involving diverse parents, particularly parents who were considered as “uncaring” or “inattentive.”

DeMatthews et al. (2016) suggest that engaging parents, who were previously marginalized by the ruling structures of the system, requires school leaders to take proactive measures, assume responsibility and the “ownership” for building relationships. Therefore, like culturally responsive school leaders who become “critical, reflective, purposeful, and fearless” to fight against injustices and create inclusive spaces for all in their schools (Lopez, 2015, p. 171), socially just leaders proactively reexamine their own beliefs, attitudes and practices about non-dominant groups and invest in improving school structures to be more inclusive of diverse families (Khalifa, 2018). Such leaders make deliberate efforts to empower their communities through an “ongoing intentional process centered in the local community involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring and group participation through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources” (Delgado-Gaitan, 1991, p. 23). To achieve this goal, socially just school leaders constantly engage in ongoing critical reflection to recognize and move beyond their pre-established conceptualizations of diverse families and children, and they create opportunities for their staff to do the same (Theoharis, 2007). Therefore, socially just school leaders invest in the capacities of their school staff in ways that give them opportunities to recognize not only systemic issues, but also their own bias (Lopez, 2015).

This study intends to inquire into the reasons casting parents, especially certain groups, out of school spaces. Focusing on school level leadership and the marginalizing structures and practices in schools, this study will employ interviews, site school observations and document analysis. This study will take place in a northern Turkish city and utilize a purposeful sampling (Patton, 2014) to select three diverse schools in terms of families’ ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The interview protocol for the larger study was designed to gain insights into structures and the contexts of the schools, practices and avenues available for parents’ involvement, educators’ attitudes, beliefs and critical awareness about PI practice and the families they are supposed to serve. The interviews will be conducted with school staff (school administrators, teachers, school counselors and so on) and parents. Parent interviews will focus on parents’ backgrounds, their previous experiences with their children’s schooling, their perceptions regarding the practice of parental involvement and how it is promoted in their children’s schools. Observations will especially focus on parents’ school visits, school-parent-meetings (how they are structured, what their primary aims are and so on) and parent-educators interactions in schools. Besides these, I will also collect any document regarding schools’ parental involvement activities. Data analysis will be an ongoing process and data will be transcribed and coded as gathered (Merriam, 2016). This process can be defined as a way of “making sense out of the data, [which] … involves consolidating, reducing, and interpreting what people have said and what the researcher has seen and read – it is the process of making meaning” (Merriam, 2016, p. 176). I will employ both inductive and deductive techniques through a constant comparative analysis process which can be defined as “a research design for multi-data sources” (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007, p. 73).

Our initial findings suggest that parents’ participation to school-based meetings can be improved by teachers, but it costs extra time and effort on teachers’ account. In this case, parents appreciated and enjoyed a dedicated teacher’s devotion to help their own children. Our findings highlight several important points for such teachers who want to attract more parents to the SPMs they organize. First of all, language used to communicate with parents appears to have several important applications. As suggested in the literature, teachers often use an aggressive, problem-centered and insulting language while communicating with parents. Our findings suggest that we need to support and better equip our teachers so that they could utilize more effective communication techniques while conversing with parents. Second, what goes into these meetings seems to have impacts on parental participation.

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