Rewriting the Rules for Engagement: Recognizing the Relational Barriers to Family Engagement

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Toward a Culturally Sustaining Model of Family and Community Engagement in Schools

Abstract

Family involvement is consistently reported as a key factor related to children’s academic success, yet school people find themselves on a perpetual quest for solutions to increase family involvement in school. Indeed, there is a dominant mainstream discourse that casts parent involvement in school as a golden ticket to resolve problems around children’s achievement, in spite of a lack of research evidence that this is the case (Robinson & Harris, 2014). Most perplexing for school people is how to increase involvement among families that are linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse (LCSD).

In this presentation, I argue that the biggest barriers to the kind of involvement educators and administrators wish to see in schools are not structural but relational. In other words, the issue is less about when a meeting is held, but about the motivations, assumptions, and expectations underlying the meeting itself. Indeed, there is a seldom-acknowledged degree of artificiality embedded in family-school relationships. These relationships are presumed to exist because they are inevitable, and as such they feel compulsory for both families and teachers. This sets up an uncomfortable backdrop for establishing relationships, leading to interactions that can seem inauthentic and forced, particularly for families. For instance, the notion of “partnership” between families and schools is commonly presented as ideal (Stitt & Brooks, 2014), but whereas “partnership” implies a relationship between stakeholders who share power, the reality of contemporary family-school relationships is that power is not shared at all (Delgado Gaitan, 2012). Olsen and Fuller (2012) document the historical shift from parents being largely responsible for and in control of schools in an agrarian economy, to their becoming “guests of the school” as the U.S. economy became increasingly industrialized. As they put it, parent guests “were invited to school for specific events and to confer about problems” (p. 6), imposing a contrived arrangement of domains that were and were not open for parental feedback or engagement.

Contemporary discourse on home-school relations is suspended between these opposing models of family-school relationships in that while few would argue that families should manage the operation of schools, there is a sense that they should be more than mere guests and in fact that they should take an active role in the life of the school (Henderson, Johnson, Mapp, & Davies, 2007; Warren, Hong, Rubin, & Uy, 2009). This has situated parents on a thin line between being characterized as overbearing “helicopters” if they are seen as trying to control schools or school people, or as absent and apathetic if they are unable or unwilling to participate in the particularly ritualized and scripted ways that have been deemed essential. Consequently, the rules of engagement for families and schools are artificial, constructed conventions that prioritize the needs of the school first and foremost; that privilege the orientations and resources of White and middle class and single-earner families; and that punish, or at least judge the values of, families that are unable to meet these expectations (Doucet, 2011a). This needs to change.

Author

• Fabienne Doucet, New York University