Session Information
14 SES 10, Parent and Teacher Cooperation
Paper Session
Contribution
Much of the literature about home-school relations tends to present it as if the different social actors (which, one should note, happen to be more than only parents and teachers) would not have different interests and develop their own agenda. Much of school-family relationships are idealized as free of tension, conflict and contradictions. Yet, authors such as Lightfoot (1978), Connell et al. (1982), Beattie (1985), Lareau (1989), David (1993), Montandon and Perrenoud (1994), Vincent (1996), Lahire (1995), Dubet (1997), Carvalho (2001), Silva (2003a), Stoer and Silva (2005), Van Zanten (2007), Henderson et al. (2007), Silva (2007) and Diogo (2008) tend to problematize this relationship.
I have theorized school-family relationships as including (Silva, 2003a): a) a relationship among cultures, i.e., a relation among the local culture(s) and school culture – this one theorized by Bourdieu, Bernstein and others as a predominantly written, urban and middle class one, and also as the social dominant culture in contemporary societies; and b) a double dyad (home and school strands; individual and collective dimensions of action). The first aspect means that culture relations are social relations, thus, power relations; so, school-family relations might act, though not necessarily, as a way of reproducing social and cultural inequalities (one of the reasons why I labelled it a “trapped relationship”); the second aspect means we face a complex web of relations, where we are before alliances and counter-alliances, formal and non-formal, among the different social actors, that are not always easy to acknowledge.
My investigation – about the influence of social class and gender in home-school relations – led me to find out that, sometimes, the complexity and subtlety of the production and reproduction of social relations in the home-school field, assumes the shape of a considerable gap between the discourse and practice of social actors. This is the case of teachers (and headmasters’) in the way they address parents.
As this is not an usual theme in the specialized literature and research about school-family relationships, I tried to focus on why some teachers (and headmasters) create this gap between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’ and how they deal with it, namely 1) why this gap exists, and 2) the diverse subtle ways they put it into practice, having also in mind that, in their interaction with the other social actors, they tend to “naturalize” that gap in a way that it seems to become a kind of a second (professional and even personal) skin.
The acknowledgement of the gap between teachers discourse and practice is probably due to the methodological strategy that was built, an ethnographic one, which, through the immersion into the everyday context of social interaction among schools and families, allowed going beyond the social actors’ discourse and confronting it with their practice. The current paper results from revisiting these fieldnotes written in the 90’s.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
BEATTIE, N. (1985) Professional Parents, Philadelphia: The Falmer Press. BURGESS, R. (1997) A Pesquisa de Terreno, Uma Introdução, Oeiras: Celta Editora [In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research, 1984]. CARVALHO, M. E. P. (2001) Rethinking Family-School Relations: A Critique of Parental Involvement in Schooling, Londres: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. CONNELL, R.W., ASHENDEN, D.J., KESSLER, S. and DOWSETT, G.W. (1982) Making The Difference - Schools, Families and Social Division, Sidney: George Allen & Unwin. DAVID, M. (1993) Parents, Gender and Education Reform, Cambridge: Polity Press. DIOGO, A. M. (2008) Investimento das Famílias na Escola, Lisboa: Celta Editora. DUBET, F. – Dir. (1997) École, Familles: Le Malentendu, Paris: Les Éditions Textuel. HENDERSON, A.; MAPP, K.; JOHNSON, V. and DAVIES, D. (2007) Beyond The Bake Sale, New York: The New Press. LAHIRE, B. (1995) Tableaux de Familles – Heurs et Malheurs Scolaires en Milieux Populaires, Paris: Seuil/Gallimard. LAREAU, A. (1989) Home Advantage - Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education, New York: The Falmer Press. LIGHTFOOT, S. (1978) Worlds Apart - Relationships Between Families and Schools, Nova Iorque: Basic Books. MONTANDON, C. and PERRENOUD, P. (1994) Entre Parents et Enseignants: Un Dialogue Impossible?, Berne: Peter Lang. SILVA, P. (2003a). Escola-Família, Uma Relação Armadilhada – Interculturalidade e Relações de Poder. Porto: Edições Afrontamento. SILVA, P. (2003b) Etnografia e Educação – Reflexões a propósito de uma pesquisa sociológica, Porto: Profedições. SILVA, P. – Org. (2007) Escolas, Famílias e Lares, Um Caleidoscópio de Olhares, Porto: Profedições. STOER, S. and SILVA, P. – Orgs. (2005) Escola-Família, Uma Relação em Processo de Reconfiguração, Porto: Porto Editora. VAN ZANTEN, A. (2007) “Reflexividad y Elección de la Escuela por los Padres de la Clase Media en Francia”, Revista de Antropología Social, Vol. 16, Publicaciones Universidad Complutense de Madrid. VINCENT, C. (1996) Parents and Teachers - Power and Participation, London: Falmer Press.
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