Between consensus and conflict: Schools and parents negotiating the educational trajectories of students at risk of early school leaving (original) (raw)
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The literature on research carried out in the field and parents’ and teachers’ declarations all point in the same direction: good collaboration between home and school is useful to the child-student for his education and learning. Despite this, parent-teacher relationships in Europe (and elsewhere), from Spain to Sweden, from Ireland to Greece, and from Italy to the Czech Republic, represent an unresolved issue. This is a complex relationship that calls into play various social spheres: macro (social), intermediary (institutional) and micro (relational); in fact, there are as many diverse realities as there are schools. In Europe, the relationshipbetween individual behaviours (parents vs. teachers), social orientations (neoliberalism) and institutional frameworks (school markets) appears significant: scarce parental participation, lack of adequate forms of home-school communications, and the need to make investments inparent and teacher training. Nevertheless, family and school are ...
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Western societies are experiencing a phase of socioanthropological upheaval driven by the social and economic effects of neoliberalism. The question arises: are these changes affecting the relationship between schools and students' families? And if so, in what way? This article begins with a brief summary of what we mean when we talk of "socioanthropological change" in this context, before going on to explore the perspectivesin regard to the school-family relationshipof what is an increasingly heterogeneous group, namely the parents of children in primary education. How do the parents of today experience this relationship? What expectations and beliefs inform their conception of it? The (still-ongoing) study described in this article was initiated in large part to address questions such as these. A key phase of the research carried out so far comprised the administration of semi-structured interviews with Italian parents of primary school children. The results discussed here are based on 101 interviews administered in 2017 and 2018 with a total of 103 parents from various towns/provinces in northern Italy (Lombardy, Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige). The participants (all volunteers) were selected using a snowball sampling method. The study was intended, ultimately, as an examination of experience (Polkinghorne, 1989) in that it sought to achieve a faithful representation of what the participants expressed. We decided this was best served by a naturalistic paradigm and a phenomenological-eidetic approach whereby, in order to apprehend the true qualities of things, the researcher's personal theories are set aside. The analysed data paints a mixed picture, with a range of different parent "types" who, in one sense or another, are looking for support to allow them to better fulfil their role as a parent. Keywords: changes in society, the family and the outlook of individuals; parents' beliefs and expectations; parents' and teachers' educational responsibilities; new forms of teacher-parent alliance.
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Relations between family and school have become quite problematic for several decades, owing to the complex tensions concerning the specific inner characters of both contexts where an increasing sense of inadequacy, as to the recent educational challenges set by the new generations, is experienced. Neither of these two institutions is able to separately achieve results in terms of quantity and quality. The consequence is the definition of a cooperation/collaboration between parents and school as a work relation characterized by common targets, mutual respect and tendency to negotiate. In order to re-establish a “pact” between school and family towards a proper care, the achievement of a joint responsibility involves the need for educational policies capable of providing a continuity of the socializable paths, thus allowing the individuals involved to find out an identity of shared values in the respect of the differences.