Towards a renewed understanding of barriers to immigrant parents’ involvement in education

Abstract

This article investigates Danish and Norwegian early childhood education and care teachers’ expectations of immigrant parents’ involvement in kindergarten. The findings are interpreted in terms of the multifaceted interplay between social class relations, culture, migration and hegemonic ideals of intensive parenting and concerted cultivation. By taking the early childhood education and care teachers’ standpoint, the article contributes a renewed understanding of previous reports of barriers to immigrant parents’ involvement in their children's education. Based on early childhood education and care teachers’ accounts, I identify three key tensions: (1) conflicting perceptions of responsibility, (2) conflicting perceptions of children's roles and how to communicate with children and (3) conflicting perceptions of what kindergarten is and what constitutes valuable knowledge. The findings suggest the existence of a distinct Nordic adaptation to intensive parenting, contradicting parts of the dominant understandings of concerted cultivation found in more school-oriented curricular contexts, such as the UK and France, while still maintaining the original key characteristics of concerted cultivation.

Advancing a cross-cultural understanding of teacher perceptions of school climate: A latent class analysis using 2018 TALIS data

“…Little is known about the role of cross-cultural factors in triggering the perception patterns of climate among teachers. Revealing cross-cultural differences is vital for designing culturally sensitive policies and interventions to encourage teacher participation in schools worldwide ( Jahreie, 2022 ). Moreover, cross-cultural similarities shed light on the analogous and comparable aspects of the school settings and structural similarities, which could inform educators to transfer successful school-based practices from one nation to another ( Berkowitz et al, 2017 ).…”

La participación familiar en el centro educativo: Percepción de las familias y del profesorado

“…Múltiples trabajos señalan la considerable brecha existente entre la teoría y la realidad de la participación familiar en las escuelas (Ansari et al, 2020;Beatson et al, 2022;Gonçalves, 2021;Hornby & Blackwell, 2018;Jahreie, 2022;Palaudàrias, 2017;Susman-Stillman et al, 2018;Vallespir et al, 2017). Vallespir et al (2017) señalan cuatro áreas fundamentales para analizar las barreras en la participación familiar, destacando así factores sociales amplios, como pueden ser la historia y la demografía, la política o la economía, los cuales influyen directamente en las instituciones escolares y familiares; los factores de las familias, como pueden ser sus creencias sobre la participación familiar, su clase social, etnia o género o, incluso, sus percepciones y vivencias; y del profesorado, entre los que se destacan las actitudes, el lenguaje empleado o la posibilidad de diferir en metas y agendas con las familias.…”