Family Involvement in Child Education and the Family-School Relationship in Romania

Abstract

The two fields, science and research, are in a relationship of mutual conditioning, meaning that there can be no science without research and no research can be conducted outside the normative framework of science. In the current context, these links appear to be more necessary than ever. Indeed, the social mission of the school increasingly surpasses the mere achievement of the pedagogical objectives from the school curriculum, given also the fact that many parents are too concerned with family, social or professional problems in order to be able to attend to their child’s progress or the consistency between the education that the child receives and the education received by the child in the family and at school. To this end, we conducted an experimental research aiming to optimize the study of concrete possibilities for improving the school-family communication and the consequences entailed by this optimization. The main purpose of this questionnaire was to identify the students’ opinion about the school’s involvement of the family in their education and the consequences of a more aggressive involvement of parents in their children’s education. The research subjects are students in the 12th grade, the Profile Services, the domain of Tourism and food, and their parents. The team of this class consists of 92 students, 44 girls and 48 boys from different backgrounds, with socially and financially vulnerable, 36 of them from urban areas and the remaining 56 families from rural areas. Based on the fact that during the school year, from the first meeting with the parents and until the present moment I have managed to build and develop a partnership relationship between the parents of the students in my class and the school, represented by the unit management, teachers and myself as head teacher of the respective class, I believe that the strategies (methods and techniques) used were effective and gave the expected result. This relationship should be further maintained and developed in order to achieve the results that we want in our work as educators. The conclusion we should draw is that cooperation between school and family means an agreement where each partner should respond to the other’s needs and intentions. In order for this to be possible, parents should contact the school not only when they are summoned to meetings with parents or when children are faced with certain difficulties.