Abstract
Parental participation is a fundamental principle of the Danish folkeskole (for children aged 6–16), yet this article explores how too much parental cooperation influences the relationship of teachers to their professional responsibility. The majority of research on parent–teacher cooperation has focused on parents’ opportunities to participate in school life, but little is known about what teachers think about such collaboration, and how imbalances in power and authority in parent–teacher cooperation influence teachers’ professionalism. The use of reflexive autoethnographic accounts, participant observation and document analysis during a four-year period in one school provided emic insight into the, often invisible, social processes of power. Semi-structured interviews with teachers in a second school were also conducted. Drawing on a body of interrelated work focusing on Bourdieu, situated learning theory and literature about professional studies, the findings suggest that parent–teacher communities can be understood as stratified fields which provide different and complex spaces for exerting power and domination. Although power in these communities is constantly negotiated, professional responsibility may be lost when parents occupy central positions in parent–teacher collaborations.
Keywords
Introduction
Parental cooperation has been central in the law governing the Danish folkeskole (for children aged 6–16) since 1974 (Ministry of Education, 2013), gaining even more importance in the last decade owing to various new initiatives to include parents in school life (Knudsen, 2010). The quality of parental cooperation is important to help children integrate the many different social arenas, such as school and home, with which they are confronted, and to avoid social exclusion and bullying in schools (see Kousholt and Fisker, 2015). The majority of research concerning parent–school cooperation has focused on the inclusion of parents in school life (Larsen et al., 2014), yet uncertainty over the roles played in collaborative work can lead to parent communities developing into critical forums in relation to the practice of schools and teachers, challenging the school’s agenda (Larsen et al., 2014). For instance, social networking and information dissemination among parents has been found to be a powerful way to circumvent professional control (Ball and Vincent, 1998). However, little is known about the loss of authority by teachers or how the balance of power between teachers and parents might tilt in favour of parents (Larsen et al., 2014).
In Denmark, the general education level in the population has increased significantly during the last decade (Statistics Denmark, 2017), yet the teacher training programme still involves only a four-year university college degree. According to Parsons (1968: 545), professions are ‘based on cultural criteria of legitimacy rather than the criteria of political power or economic success’. Teaching therefore involves an asymmetrical relationship between the professional and the client, since the teacher is the authority in the classroom. According to Solbrekke and Englund (2011: 854), professional responsibility relies on mutual trust and respect between the person assuming responsibility and the person for whom responsibility is assumed. Yet much learning theory and child-centred teaching emphasizes that teaching takes place on the learner’s terms, focusing on the child. These contradictory demands on teachers’ professionalism pose questions about how issues of power, authority and dominance between teachers and parents are negotiated and represented in the school setting. The question is what happens to teachers’ feelings of professional responsibility when their legitimacy and professional authority is threatened – for instance, in settings of parental cooperation where parents may dominate.
In order to match the complexities of social processes, this study draws on Bourdieu’s work, combined with theory which regards learning processes as socially and culturally situated, and literature about professional studies. Teachers’ professional becoming is approached by looking at the divergences and interplay between sociocultural structures of the parental learning context, and by exploring power, cooperation and participation in relation to teachers’ professionalism.
Related research
Parent–teacher cooperation
The inclusion of parents and pupils in the school’s work is a fundamental aim in Danish schools. But the ambitions regarding parental cooperation have changed during the last decade (Knudsen, 2010) from being largely rooted in academic concerns to also including concerns about pupils’ welfare and social activities (Knudsen, 2009). Parental cooperation has been recognized and acknowledged as a cultural necessity in Denmark (Dannesboe et al., 2012), and research indicates that parents in general wish to be recognized for their active contribution to the school’s work and to be seen as responsible, good parents (Dannesboe, 2012; Larsen et al., 2014; Palludan, 2012). Hence, in most Danish schools, new types of parental involvement have been implemented to supplement parent–school meetings (Larsen et al., 2014). These include family courses, parental contracts, social and academic plans for individual pupils, and various types of dialogues and requests to parents to become involved to improve the social climate of the classroom. Forældreintra is an electronic platform for parents, pupils and teachers, and is widely used in parent–school communication (Dannesboe, 2012; Larsen et al., 2014). Yet research indicates that parental cooperation is often taken for granted and seen as a positive asset, although it also covers a diversity of relatively undefined initiatives (Larsen et al., 2014). For instance, the aim and concrete structure of parent–school cooperation is often unclear to both parents and teachers. Unclear and undefined expectations and responsibility in relations between parents and teachers may lead to negotiations among parents about what responsible parental behaviour is (Larsen et al., 2014; Reay, 2005). The literature argues that parents’ approach to schools depends on their social-class group, and that parental social capital facilitates parental involvement (Ball and Vincent, 1998, 2007; Reay, 2004). However, the literature contains little evidence about how sociocultural differences influence parent–teacher cooperation. Like their Nordic peers, many Danish teachers feel that being a teacher is demanding because pupils and parents are difficult to deal with (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2010: 96). Although parental cooperation has been a central aspect of legislation on Danish schools for the last four decades, there is no secure body of knowledge about this. The literature contains various practice-related recommendations, but concerns about inadequate or conflictual parental collaboration have been raised (Larsen et al., 2014; Reay, 2004, 2005). Knudsen (2007) found that parents who assume that their experience is relevant easily threaten teachers’ authority; teachers who view parents as opponents are left with few opportunities for action, apart from sticking together. The literature suggests that there is a need to clarify the institutional embeddedness of conflictual and oppositional parental cooperation (Larsen et al., 2014: 49), but there is little evidence about how teachers experience conflictual relationships with parents.
The teaching profession and professionalism
The concept of professionalism in the literature is often implicit or not defined at all (Beijaard et al., 2004). Currently, there is no agreement about what teacher professionalism is (Lei et al., 2012). The teaching profession is often referred to as a semi-profession (Hjort and Weber, 2004) or a ‘minor profession’ (Schon, 1987: 9), based less on systematic knowledge than ‘full’ professions such as medicine and law, which have gained greater legitimacy. Teachers have lost the monopoly over their teaching knowledge and therefore constantly have to negotiate their mandate to legitimize their profession (Hjort and Weber, 2004). Danish teachers report that society has little respect for teachers; in Denmark, it is difficult to recruit enough students for teacher training courses, and dropout rates are high (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2010). Teachers are, in general, not recognized for their work (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2010: 117), and the profession has lost its attraction and prestige (Hjort and Weber, 2004; Punakallio and Dervin, 2015). Overall, the literature has not explored the response from teachers to the diverse forms of pressure to which they are subjected.
Research suggests that teachers’ professionalism develops in various ways depending on the context in which it occurs (Beijaard et al., 2004; Dahl, 2017; Nasir and Cooks, 2009; Vincent and Warren, 1997) – for instance, in relation to teachers’ notions of professional community (Goodson and Cole, 1994) and in relation to collective peer groups in teacher communities (Scott and Armstrong, 2016). But the literature does not provide insight into how imbalances in relations between parents and teachers influence teachers’ professional work. However, professionals working with parents construct their understanding of their role depending on the ‘space’ available to them in parent-centred organizations (Vincent and Warren, 1997). Yet the link between teachers’ professionalism and parental communities is yet to be discovered.
Theory
Power and participation in situated learning communities
Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of the field as a diverse sociocultural site in which different forms of capital are negotiated as power positions providing different forms of advantages in relational processes (see also Bourdieu, 1977) might explain how subjects dominate and impact social practices based on sociocultural status. Forms of cultural and economic capital such as social networks, education credentials, dominant lifestyles and monetary income among parents may be transformed into symbolic violence and thus domination, as capital is negotiated as positions of power (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986, 2005). Cultural, social and/or economic capital might transform into symbolic capital as forms of ‘legitimate accumulation, through which the dominant groups or classes secure a capital of “credit”’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 197). The literature suggests that parental participation is gendered and facilitated by social capital (Reay, 2004); parents, especially upper-class mothers, may therefore achieve authority over teachers by inflicting symbolic power to impose alternative constructions of reality.
Situated learning theory focuses on how individuals acquire professional skills through apprenticeship in communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) – for instance, the parent–teacher community – and on the relationship between learning and the social situation in which it occurs, such as formal and informal meetings between teachers and parents. The focus of analysis is therefore teachers’ social engagement in the specific learning context in which parental cooperation takes place. Understanding teachers’ collaboration with parents as communities of practice might reveal how teachers’ learning processes are not only cognitive acquisitions of propositional knowledge, but also situated in processes of participation in the professional school–home community. In relation to professional studies, this means asking what kinds of social engagements provide the proper context for teachers’ learning, enabling them to become legitimate members of situated parent–teacher learning communities.
Institutional settings are spaces which transform and entail boundaries, opportunities and conditions for different kinds of practice (Dahl, 2017). According to Woodward (2007, cited in Lagermann, 2015: 578), striated spaces are created by territorial lines that ‘organize by drawing strict boundaries, creating binary oppositions and dividing space into rigid segments with a hierarchical structure’, whereas smooth spaces create opportunities for change, referred to as ‘lines of flight’, where a line is ‘a pure movement of change’ that is open-ended. Lagermann (2015: 578) argues that these two spaces coexist interdependently within the same space and are always interwoven. This might explain how teachers’ opportunities for participation and thus learning in parent–teacher communities offer diverse opportunities for change – for instance, in teachers’ professionalism.
Professional learning and becoming as social practice
Wenger (1998) defines meaning-making, learning and identity formation as social processes entangled in practice. This means seeing teachers’ professional formation as deeply interconnected and mutually defining with social practice, meaning-making and social configuration (Wenger, 1998: 5). Inspired by Bourdieu’s (1986) notion of the field as a hierarchically structured field of social practice and Lave and Wenger’s (1991) approach to learning as situated in specific contexts of social practice and meaning-making, parent–teacher communities can be seen as processes of mutual learning in communities with specific characteristics, in which parents and teachers alone or in turn are the dominant parties. Viewing learning as social and tied to the social and cultural context within which it occurs means seeing learning as both a cognitive and a sociocultural process (Nasir and Cooks, 2009: 41; Rogoff, 1990; Wenger, 1998), and that social contexts play an active role in processes of professional formation. Social participation is learning and meaning-making (Lave, 1993), and ‘teacher professionalism’ is a way of being in the world, since it is ‘negotiated experience of self’ (Wenger, 1998: 150) . This view permits us to explore how teachers actively construct issues of professionalism as integrated aspects of activity ‘in and with the world at all times’ (Lave, 1993: 8).
The concept of becoming stems from a post-structural perspective, which can be useful to explore processes of positioning such as processes of gaining power and influence in a specific field. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), learning is often thought of as an interplay of deconstruction and reconstruction, such as the difference between then and now; however, becoming emerges from a process of ‘mutual de- and re-territorialization’, which is the movement from then to now (Clegg et al., 2005: 159). So, considering learning in terms of becoming means focusing on movement(s) rather than on what is moved; it implicates a possible transgression of the boundaries of a system (see Dahl, 2017: 27). Exploring becoming in relation to movements and participation in communities of practice allows us to make more informed interpretations about how teachers’ movements and positioning in parental connections make them think, act and become professionals in strained and hierarchical contexts.
Professional ethics as street-level practice
Pursuing Korthagen’s (2004) notion of the essence of teachers’ souls being a personal mission that is grounded in ethics, this article focuses on professionalism and identity as something deeply rooted in moral and ethical questions about teachers’ work – that is, how teachers feel responsible for being teachers. According to Martinsen (2006, cited in Solbrekke and Englund, 2011: 854), ‘“responsibility” conceptually assumes a proactive attitude … in which a professional voluntarily takes responsibility for “the other”, by involving his or her capacity to act morally responsibly’. ‘Accountability’ is the reverse process, since it emphasizes ‘the duty to account for one’s actions, and concerns what is rendered to another’ (Solbrekke and Englund, 2011: 854). The notion of professional responsibility/accountability allows us to explore teachers’ professionalism as something which is rooted in moral obligation, assumed by the teacher herself or bestowed upon a teacher to be used to act for other interests.
The perspective of professional ethics combined with the theory of professional legalization of bureaucratic accountability (Lipsky, 1980) permits us to explore how power and dominance in parental cooperation influence teachers’ professional ethics. Lipsky’s (1980) theory of street-level bureaucracy informs about how public policies are performed and become manifest in the organization of schools, where national education policies are put into action by public workers such as teachers in daily parent–teacher negotiations. In Lipsky’s view, teachers are street-level bureaucrats who establish and invent devices, decisions and routines to cope with uncertainties and work pressure, which effectively become the public policies they carry out (Dahl, 2017: 37). Policy is therefore remade in the daily, messy encounters between parents and teachers, and is not a direct effect of lofty visions about democratic parental cooperation in public policy.
Methodology
Research design, methods and ethics
The study involved a four-year (2013–2017) reflexive autoethnographic study in one school (School A) and interviews for one month (2017) in a second school (School B). The schools are situated in two of the five municipalities in Denmark with the highest income per household and highest educational level per adult inhabitant (Statistics Denmark, 2017). The schools were chosen to allow a focus on possible differences in socio-economic and educational status between parents and teachers, and on negotiations of professional legitimacy in parental cooperation. In School A, reflexive autoethnographic fieldwork was conducted in one class from preparatory to Class 3, allowing for introspection for four years at quarterly parent–school meetings and monthly school visits. Three teachers and three parents were interviewed individually between two and four times each during 2013–2017. Using an autoethnographic approach, in which the researcher is a full participant in the social scene, made it possible to discover implicit learning processes which can be explored by considering the effects of fieldwork on the ethnographer (Davies, 1999: 178). Documents from Forældreintra were also included. In School B, two semi-structured interviews with one teacher were carried out in 2017. All of the interviews lasted between 36 minutes and 2 hours 50 minutes.
As a parent in one of the case schools (School A), I was able to use previous links of common biography (Chang, 2007) with other parents and the teachers. These existing insights and rapport benefitted the study, but also invoked constant negotiation about positioning myself in the dual role (Anderson, 2006) of researcher and parent. The use of a situated ethics based on a ‘morality of the moment’ (Jacobsen and Kristiansen, 2001: 114), situated in the context rather than in general abstract ethics, enabled me to balance my privileged position as a researcher to include a sensible presence and act responsibly for parents’ and teachers’ well-being in concrete situations. My dual role inevitably generated feelings of alienation and frustration as a parent; yet withdrawing partially from social events during the fieldwork enabled me to transcend these feelings, while reflecting on them and including them as valuable information about invisible power processes in the data material.
Data analysis
The data analysis focused on a decentred analytical approach (Lagermann, 2015: 574), which breaks with dominant individualizing discourses since it emphasizes that people are social participants involved in personal trajectories in relation to structural arrangements of social practice (Dreier, 2008, cited in Lagermann, 2015: 575). All of the observations and interviews were transcribed in full and – alongside documents downloaded from Forældreintra – translated from Danish into English. The data was then analysed in three steps, focusing on the overall theme of exploring parental participation and teachers’ professional becoming as situated learning in parent–teacher communities of practice. The first step included a ‘lengthwise’ reading (Haavind, 2000: 172) in which incidents and reflections related to parent–teacher cooperation and teacher professionalism were underlined. These included participants’ struggles with problematic collaborations, dilemmas, meaning-making, social engagements and professional movements. Phenomena which could not be included in these pre-understandings were also highlighted, asking questions like ‘What is this?’ and ‘How can this be understood?’ (Lagermann, 2013: 545). The second step included a ‘crosswise’ reading (Haavind, 2000: 174) in which emphasized sections from the first process were compared and categorized under superior and cross-cutting themes. In the third step, phenomena such as teachers’ use of managerial support and legislative frameworks, and the informal production of professionalism, which could not be included in the first two steps of the analysis, were examined. In this data, contexts were carefully analysed as sets of connections (Strathern, 1987) between participants, incidents and the school. This made it possible to situate conflictual incidents taking place with parents in a wider context of symbolic capital, power and ‘striated’ becoming, which was used to support the findings about how parental participation became ingrained in situated school practices as double binds and professional deficits.
Findings and discussion
Domination and negotiation in parent–teacher cooperation
Social relationships and power negotiation were constant themes in collaboration between parents and teachers, and were perceived as significant by both parties:
Positioning and opportunities for participation in parent–teacher communities
The parent–teacher communities in this study provided a space for exerting power and domination, constituting a diverse and stratified field of often opposing forms of capital (Bourdieu, 2005) in which power was constantly negotiated. Parent representatives had the legal authority to attend at least two meetings per year with teachers. But individual parents often contacted the school management as well, leading to the involvement of teachers in solving problems arising in teacher–parent relationships. Parents contacted teachers regarding issues that extended beyond academic work, and teachers reported exhaustion due to the extent of the additional workload attributable to parents. Parents sometimes attended class to observe and keep track of how teachers interacted with their children. And parents’ representatives often used Forældreintra to inform and encourage parents to complain about teachers when teachers did not meet parents’ expectations. Teachers often felt criticized by parents regarding their use of classwork, communication and pedagogical practice. This was a common everyday experience for many teachers, as revealed in the following letter from parents’ representatives to parents: We are, of course, concerned about the teaching team’s ideas about a combined third-year group, and recommend more information about this. The same goes for issues relating to space, the schoolyard and changes in rooms. We have also discussed the food situation and asked where children should spend their time if they arrive at school early. We’ve discussed activities … in the club, criteria for class division (it is important that these criteria are clear – important that the children do not feel that there is a top and bottom in the class, etc.). We have also discussed the teaching team’s communication on [Forældre]Intra and [if children] hand in assignments after the deadline, or are afraid of being told off if they fail to comply with the ‘Requirements for Assignments and Neatness’. If you or your child have had a similar experience, we’d like to hear from you. … We will try to form an accurate picture of how many children have the same experience, and that is why our questions are broad. (Document from parents’ representatives, Forældreintra, School A, Class 2) I love it [being a parent representative] and have the time for it. If I had a full-time job, I’m not sure I would have the same … then I might think differently about it. I think it’s because I participated in some school development projects. That has really whetted my appetite. And from an egoistic perspective, it gives me the chance to influence my own children’s welfare. (Interview, parent representative, School A, Class 3)
Feelings of being dominated seemed to work both ways, but mothers had far more time to spend on parent–teacher cooperation than teachers. This often led teachers to give up when faced with such parents. According to Bourdieu (2005: 106), 'the cultural capital that is effectively transmitted within the family itself, depends not only on the quantity of cultural capital, itself accumulated by spending time, that the domestic group possess, but also on the usable time (particularly in the form of mothers’ free time) available to it. Mothers, especially middle-class mothers (Reay, 2004: 65), who invest time and emotional involvement in their children’s education might therefore ‘spur children on academically’ (62). This meant that mothers' participation in school life enabled them to accumulate cultural capital, thereby placing them in advantageous positions in relation to teachers.
According to Bourdieu (1977: 165), symbolic power is used ‘to impose the principles of the construction of reality – in particular, social reality’ – which, according to Bourdieu, is a major dimension of political power. Parental participation and modes of dominating teachers’ work had become doxa – undisputed lay knowledge (Bourdieu, 1986). The forms of parental participation and dominance that took place in the school apparently became naturalized: It’s difficult to speak with them [teachers]. Because they see something else and they feel that their work as a professional is being attacked. But they are teachers, not psychologists, and they are not my child’s parents. They need to remember that there are other experts on families and children in the world today, and that parents are in one respect the greatest experts on their own children. (Interview, parent representative, School A, Class 3) If people [parents] sit there for more than two years, they get to know the school management. You know many of the people there. You get advantages which benefit the class. Because I’ve been a representative for so long, I don’t have to talk to the mid-level managers. I go directly to the headmaster. And that always pays off. … Because he’s the one with a mandate to decide. (Interview, parent representative, School A, Class 3)
In practice, teachers rarely complained about parents in public. For instance, only once over a period of nine years had a parent representative experienced teachers collectively complaining to the management about certain parents. Teachers seemingly recognized parents as dominant parties. Domination worked in subtle ways, and teachers and parents had developed ‘a capital of trust’ stemming from social esteem and material wealth (see Bourdieu, 1977). Some parents’ collection and display of luxury items, such as expensive cars, designer handbags and expensive homes which were out of reach of most teachers, attested to the taste and distinction of their owner (see Bourdieu, 1977).
Drawing on Woodward (cited in Lagermann, 2015), teachers’ participation was like being organized in a striated space where relatively strict boundaries for teachers’ participation were drawn. Clegg et al. (2005: 160) explain how processes of becoming are the ‘folding and unfolding of lines, the knotting and netting of different materials and organs that mutually de- and reterritorialize each other in order to become something different’ – for instance, from earlier ways of becoming. From the perspective of Lave and Wenger (1991) and Woodward (2007, cited in Lagermann, 2015: 578), the social situation in parent–teacher communities allowed teachers certain movements, which were neither pure ‘lines of flight’ nor completely blocked spaces of becoming, but rather oscillations between different points and boundaries – the boundary being parents’ somewhat unrestricted ‘lines of flight’ in their relatively smooth spaces. This suggests that teachers could only partly control the space of parental cooperation and only partly transcend the opportunities created for them to produce smoothness, change and deterritorialization in parental cooperation.
Coping with pressure and implications for professional responsibility
This section explores teachers’ reactions to parental discipline and what this meant for the shaping of their professional responsibility. Many teachers felt that parental cooperation pressurized them and inhibited their efforts to establish a suitable pedagogical practice: It [parental interference] drained me. What I really wanted to do was teach, but I wasn’t allowed to do that. Because I was constantly confronted with lots of things happening in class. … I didn’t have much energy and became irritated. Being irritated exhausted me, and I didn’t have much enthusiasm left over for the children. Somehow my commitment disappeared. So my focus changed. (Interview, teacher, School B, Class 5) [E]verything was a bit chaotic. I kept it going in that old-fashioned way – not only blackboard teaching, but also evaluation, if they [pupils] had understood it. I was the one talking. It was a monologue – old-fashioned school. Because that was the way I could keep silence in class. If we had a lot of group work, then all these small intrigues started. So I had to stick to the traditional way of schooling. (Interview, teacher, School B, Class 5)
Conclusion
This article has explored power and domination in parent–teacher cooperation and what too much parental cooperation in two Danish schools means for teachers’ exercise of professional responsibility. The study is original because it is one of the first to demonstrate that parent–teacher relationships play an important role in how teachers build professional responsibility in their everyday work. The article argues that teachers are situated in conflictual social and structural double binds which pressurize them with demands from legislations, parents and school administrations for enhanced parental cooperation at the same time as professionalism.
Power and domination are often part of social and rather invisible processes, but the use of long-term autoethnographic accounts made it possible to study parent–teacher communities from emic perspectives. The study demonstrates that the standards defined by the teaching profession are sometimes replaced by control of teachers’ in-service performance by stakeholders outside the teaching profession, owing to power imbalances in parent–teacher cooperation. Some studies have found that professional accountability is subject to external political control, which challenges the moral implications of professional responsibility (Solbrekke and Englund, 2011: 854). However, the analysis suggests that it is the nature of parental cooperation which causes teachers to act in an accountable rather than responsible manner. When teachers’ practices are influenced by pressure from parents, teachers become accountable to standards other than their moral obligations to pupils. Parental cooperation might therefore result in teacher practices that ignore the complexity of professional responsibility. Social class and dominance (Ball and Vincent, 2007; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) and gendered parental cooperation (Reay, 2004) are integrated aspects of school life. Heightening the awareness of school managers and other stakeholders regarding the multifaceted social processes involved in parent–teacher communities, and providing opportunities for teachers during their pre- and in-service training to learn to handle conflictual situations with parents, might help to develop parental forums into resources for teachers, especially in settings characterized by unequal capital among teachers and parents.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the two anonymous peer-reviewers and to Dorte Koushoult for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.