Doing Enough? Examining Parents’ and Educators’ Understandings of and Experiences with Family-School Relations

• In Event: 207 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Family-School Relationships

Abstract

Parent involvement has received considerable attention in education policy in recent years, based upon the assumption that strong family-school relationships translate into positive educational outcomes. Across these calls for involvement, it is often assumed that parents and teachers have a shared understanding of why and how parents should engage in their child’s education. Yet a growing body of research demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case. Although previous studies have investigated a range of influences on family-school relations individually, relatively few have explored the ways in which they interact – that is, how various factors that shape teacher and parent views, respectively, combine to produce parents’ type and extent of engagement in support of their children’s education. Drawing from in-depth interviews with teachers and mothers and parent survey data exploring exploring parents’ juggling acts with work, home and school obligations, this paper examines how mothers and educators understand expectations for parental engagement in children’s education, the sources of those understandings, and ways that those understandings together mold family-school relationships. The research reveals divergence in parents’ and teachers’ conceptions of parental engagement, stemming from external performance pressures on educators to stress school-based models of family-school relations and the realities mothers face in needing to fit engagement into their roles at work and home.

Authors

• Linn Posey-Maddox, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Anna Haley-Lock, University of Wisconsin-Madison