Social representations of educability

Abstract

Abstract. In the framework of the theory of social representations, the study set out to examine how Finnish parents and teachers have received a major change in educational policy. Surveys on parents' and comprehensive school teachers' views of ongoing school reforms indicated that current educational discourse is structured by two different representations -a "selective" one and a "comprehensive" one -which contain two different notions of intelligence -"natural" and "sociorelativistic" The subjects' social position (socioeducational status and expertise) in the educational hierarchy tended to organize their representations. The findings indicated that the different groups have different relationships to official educational policy and to the ethos of educability embodied by the school.

School’s out: a comprehensive follow-up study on parents’ perceptions of their child’s school

“…Pertaining to the debate on educational policy, there is an implicit paradox here: although middle-class parents used to base their critical views of the comprehensive school on the claim that it tended to underrate the differences in pupil's giftedness and thus posed a threat to the pupil's individuality (Räty and Snellman 1998), this view was not much supported by the highly educated parents' perceptions of their child's schooling as revealed in this study. In comparison, the working-class parents' expressed concerns about the social inequality of the educational reforms, and the school system in general were supported by their perception in this study that the treatment of the pupils was less fair than was found by the academically educated parents.…”

“…Likewise, there is a widely shared conviction among parents and teachers that the present comprehensive school system has succeeded in achieving good results and in reducing social differences (Räty and Snellman 1998). Similarly, the rate of parental participation is generally quite high, at least during the early years of primary school, and the experiences related are positive ).…”

How are children’s perceptions of the malleability of their academic competencies related to their teachers’ and parents’ views?

“…We examined this assumption in the intrapersonal domain and found, in line with the hypothesis, that the children's perceptions of the malleability of their competencies were the most optimistic, followed by their parents' and lastly by their teachers' perceptions in both school subjects. These results probably stem from the fact that parents and particularly teachers seem to share the school system's view of ability as a relative stable quality, i.e., the 'theory of natural giftedness' (Mugny and Carugati 1989;Räty and Snellman 1998). In addition, the more optimism expressed by the parents than the teachers may reflect the fact that the parents are more inclined to a self-serving attribution pattern than teachers due to their more personal relationship with their child.…”

“…Highly educated parents are generally closer to the school and its definition of ability as essentially a cognitive-verbal feature than other parents (Räty and Snellman 1998), and they tend to attribute more cognitive-verbal skills to their child than others do (e.g., Räty et al 2006a). Moreover, in our earlier study, we found that the self-serving attribution pattern was stronger among academically than vocationally educated parents (Räty et al 2006b; see also Kärkkäinen et al 2009).…”

“…Earlier research has suggested that teachers and parents are inclined to resort to the 'theory of natural giftedness' when explaining differences in children's school achievement (Mugny and Carugati 1989), and thus share a potentially pessimistic frame of assessing children's potential for improvement. As teachers are more engaged in normative assessment and seem to endorse the theory of natural giftedness more strongly than parents (Räty and Snellman 1998), we further supposed that the teachers' perceptions of the children's potential for improvement would be still more pessimistic than those of the parents.…”