Understanding teachers’ perception of children’s learning and interaction with the families

• In Event: Understanding social responsibility towards teaching and learning, Part 2: The role of school actors.

Proposal

Global evidence pointing to the advantages of a strong school-community linkage leading to better school achievement (Epstein, 2011). Research on school community partnerships in India has been limited to community mobilisation within the institutional structures such as the School Management Committee. Intervention studies have targeted the members of these committees, especially from the side of the community in raising awareness about their roles and responsibilities through information campaigns (Banerjee et al, 2008; Pandey et al., 2008), empowering them to ensure monitoring of the schools (Gowda et al., 2014) and encouraging them to actively participate in dialogue with the school teachers (Galab et al., 2013). However, an important aspect of teachers’ views, their perceptions and challenges around interacting with the surrounding community, in particular parents has received less attention. To utilise the strengths of institutional arrangements that aim to build school community partnerships, to ensure buy-in and at the same time minimise opposition from the school actors, it is important to understand how they perceive the role of communities in children’s learning and how such interactions affect them.
Drawing on semi-structured in- depth interviews with 17 primary school teachers including head masters, regular teachers and contract teachers across 6 study sites, this paper unpacks the experiences of teachers in the context of government primary schools in rural Sitapur district in India. Specifically, it will discuss the purpose and intent behind teachers’ interactions with the community and parents of children they teach. Alongside this, it will reflect on how teachers think about their as well as community/parents’ role in children’s learning.
The key questions raised by this work are:
a) What are the various ways in which teachers interact with the parents? What are the intended and actual outcomes from the interactions?
b) What do teachers identify as the key points of tension between schools and the surrounding community?
c) How do teachers perceive community, parents and their own role in children’s learning?
The results highlight attendance and regularity of children, parental involvement with their children at home and “understanding the children better” as the areas that were affected positively due to interactions. Although teachers perceive these interactions to be useful in some ways, they often find themselves demotivated to continue due to resource and time constraints as well as lack of participation of parents. The system driven reasons for interactions are mostly for fulfilling official paperwork, while the self- driven reasons are mostly carried out to ensure cordial relations between the teachers and parents. Crucially, interactions for the purpose of providing or coordinating support for children’s learning are rarely mentioned.

Overall, an understanding of teacher’s perspectives on interactions between schools and the community is very relevant at a time when schools have been closed for more than 6 months due to the global pandemic. While understanding the benefits teachers derived from interactions can help in keeping them motivated, highlighting the challenges faced by teachers could be helpful in supporting them better when the school reopen.

Authors

• Mansi Nanda, University of Cambridge

• Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge

• Suman Bhattacharjea, ASER Centre