Family, school and community collaboration - school edagogues caught in double binds

Abstract

Emphasizing the importance of community collaboration is a recent and in Croatian research a relatively unexplored way of positioning family-school relationships in the wider exosystem and macrosystem, within which they develop. The aim of this paper is to analyse contradictory expectations school pedagogues are exposed to in the process of family, school and community collaboration. More specifically, after analysing the discrepancies between theoretical and legislative articulations of community collaboration and the practical limitations that arise in their implementation, we discuss the responsibility of pedagogues to identify specific needs of families in collaboration with the community contrasted with the remedial and deficit perception of families which can, in doing so, be easily demonstrated, as well as consider the imperative theoretical requirements for a close connection between family, school and community contrasted with the managerial and coordinating role that pedagogues can, due to contextual limitations, take on. The concluding part of the paper offers guidelines for further research on this topic.