When Covid-19 put people into widespread physical and interpersonal isolation, we already know from experience the change would create additional, only partially predictable needs. Lagging behind of heretofore real local school community—parent–teacher–school, or even intra-parent—came to the surface (Epstein et al, 2019). In the absence of both psychologic as well as physical Community, people began to appreciate what the lack of such Community would entail—above all a deficit of relational trust—one essential to supporting close collaboration, secure bonding, honest positive relationships, and relatively harmonious interaction amidst increasing surfacing of strong, polarizing, personal, developmental, cultural, and/implicit or obvious diversities.

R.Q.: What are the main /principal elements/features that constitute a successful parent-school relationship & partnership.

I hoped to gain insight, 1) into how much enthusiasm and participation parents in my sample had had for intense involvement with their children’s school pre-Covid-19, 2) whether such interest and intention had been retained, augmented, or diminished by the difficulties, or the opportunities for connection revealed by the necessity for parents to somewhat become co-teacher-collaborators in their children’s education, and 3) whether any perhaps previously unrecognized or previously unappreciated factors had been introduced into the parent-teacher-school relational mix.

International research (Epstein, 2005, Henderson & Mapp, 2002) has shown how reinforced parent’s collaboration with the school community, seems to have positive effects in children’s academic success (Aronson, 1996) as it improves attitude and school performance (Bradley, Caldwell, & Rock, 1988). Numerous ideas, proposals, and models that seek to enhance parent-school partnership, have been proposed from time to time, which attempt to organize the different ways in which the interaction of school and family can best be maintained.  In the context of my intent to strengthen the effectiveness of an innovative parent’ engagement model, the theoretical territory most productive to explore lay at the intersection of transformative learning (Mezirow, 2012), from Adults’ Learning Theories, and the principles of philosophy for children- P4C (Lipman &Sharp, 1994) that fosters a community-based reflection and dialogue and could be an applicable educational proposal for adult learners. Both stances are grounded on the proposition that personal and social growth are fostered by dialogue in intrapersonal thought as well as by interpersonal verbal communication that is increasingly liberated from the constraints of personal (sometimes society-wide) assumptions that confine thought and action to patterns that have become or were always dysfunctional.

When Covid-19 changed the conditions for and demands on the entire educational system, the gap in the relationship & partnership between teachers, parents, (and implicitly children) has become increasingly apparent (Mapp & Bergman, 2019). For the construction and maintenance of such a foundation there were things that research hadn’t earlier recognized as particularly important that turned out to be quite essential. New knowledge of their existence was of concern because, the widespread burgeoning of online learning is to be expected because of an increasing dearth of funds worldwide and exponentially expanding technology, even if an environmental mortal threat was absent.

Therefore, extending the Parents’ Community of Inquiry model (Papathanasiou, 2022) to bridging the gap, it would necessitate building a coherent Community of Inquiry with an overarching influence strong enough that it could leverage disparate people out of concrete thinking, and/or affiliation-based mindsets. As developmental psychologist Robert Kegan often says about why developmental change occurs: it’s the environment that mandates and then either supports or bars new ways of thinking and change.In this case, community must encompass a group of people—maybe initially disparate—to the point where there can be a sense of belonging (Galbraith, 2004). A sense of belonging that does not just include, but fully respects, values, and eventually welcomes diversity.

This has been a comparative study related to the topic and in combination with the emergency of the Pandemic. The idea for a comparative study of a social phenomenon, has been explored as a tool used for the researcher to compare parents- school relationship and partnership before and during the Pandemic because of its enormous effect in education worldwide. A questionnaire was created in order to search for data related to the topic among a five-country (Spain, Italy, Greece, USA, Costa Rica) international sample of parents of school-age children who had experienced schooling under both “normal” face-to-face conditions and then the online-learning constraints imposed by the Pandemic. This questionnaire was built in such a way that with the help of a specialized statistical and qualitative research tool (MAXQDA 2020) to be coded and process mainly a qualitative but also a minimal descriptive quantitative analysis of the data. Personally selected non-random groups of parents in the five countries listed above were asked via the survey that was distributed via email and social media to share insights on their relationship with their children as well as on a number of factors concerning their family relationship with their child/ren’s school they considered wanting or positive both before and during the Pandemic. The survey questions were constructed in a way that I hoped would elicit answers that would be relevant to improving parents’ relationship with their child(ren), their teachers, and the school in a post-Covid world.

Improvement, if needed—or lack of it—would be expected to have an impact on the future implementation and success of the proposed P4C-based model dependent on implementing tripartite parent-teacher-child engagement in a teacher-facilitated Community of Inquiry engaged in development of reasoning-skills-enhancing reflective dialogue. The adult learning theory that seemed to promise an important contribution to model refinement was Jack Mezirow’s Transformative Learning, particularly including its discourse circles that substantially mirror the concept and execution of P4C for adults. The results of the conceptual study and analysis, seem to support the relevance of the researcher-identified connection between Mezirow’s transformative learning and Lipman and Sharp’s P4C principles (Lipman, 2009) in that the responses of the international participants favored communication and dialogue as factors in improving their relationship with their children’s school (Survey Question 18) and socio-emotional learning as a factor that had assumed increased importance for them because of the stresses imposed by the Covid shutdown and online learning (Survey Question 21). At the same time the relevance of Marsick and Watkins’ model (1999) of organizational learning, embodied in their “Learning Organization” is also potentially relevant to the task of building a unified community of Parents, Teachers, Children, and School-as-a-whole that must co-operate and learn together. That in connection to Lipman and Sharp’s principles regarding the Community of Philosophical inquiry are sui generis in their common need, to keep learning continually to the point that it can transform itself, and its members as individuals, as a group—in sum, as an organization characterized by trusting relationships and robustness of knowledge as a common good to be sought.

Aronson, J.Z., (1996). How schools can recruit hard-to-reach parents. Educational Leadership. 53(7), 58-60. Bradley, R. H., Caldwell, B. M., & Rock, S. L. (1988). Home environment and school performance: A ten-year follow-up and examination of three models of environmental action. Child Development, 59, 852–867. Epstein, L.J. (2005). Links in a Professional Development Chain: Preservice and Inservice Education for Effective Programs of School, Family, and Community Partnerships. The New Educator 1, no. 2: 125-41. Epstein, L.J., Jung, S.B. & Sheldon, B.S. (2019). Toward Equity in School, Family, and Community Partnerships. In Sheldon, B., S. & Tammy, A. (Eds.), The Wiley Handbook of Family, School, and Community Relationships in Education. John Wiley & Sons. Galbraith, W.M. (2004). Adult Learning Methods: A Guide for Effective Instruction (3rd.ed.). Krieger Publishing Company. Henderson, T. A. & Mapp, L. K. (2002). A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement (Annual Synthesis 2002). Austin, TX: National Center of Family and Community Connections with Schools, SEDL, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Lipman, M. (2009). Philosophy for Children: Some assumptions and implications. In Marsal, E., Dobashi, T., Weber, B. (eds.), Children Philosophize Worldwide. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Lipman, M. & Sharp, A.M. (1994). Growing up with Philosophy. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company. Mapp, K. L. & Bergman, E. (2019). Dual capacity-building framework for family-school partnerships (Version 2). Retrieved from: www.dualcapacity.org Marsick, V. & Watkins, K. (1999). Facilitating learning organizations: Making learning count. Aldershot: Gower Press. Mezirow, J. (2009). An overview on transformative learning. In K. Illeris (ed.), Contemporary Theories of Learning: Learning Theorists: In Their Own Words. Routledge. Mezirow, J. (2012). Learning to think like an adult. In E. W. Taylor & P. Cranton (Eds.), The handbook of transformative learning: Theory, research, and practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Papathanasiou, M. (2022). Enhancing Parents’ Engagement to Enhance Children’s Learning. In Handbook of Research on Family Literacy Practices and Home School Connections, (Eds). IGI Global. ISBN13: 9781668445693