Parental collaboration in relation to children’s school lives – advanced regulation or an opportunity for solidarity?

Abstract

Parental collaboration is both promoted for enhancing children’s performance and criticized for reproducing educational inequality. The issue of parental collaboration, thus, presents an opportunity to discuss theoretical differences in current debates about education, notably the educational consequences of social background and governmentality. The article emphasizes the conflictual nature of children’s school lives and analyzes the social interplay between the involved subjects, who are connected through their engagement in common matters and concerns. Our analysis challenges approaches inspired by Bourdieu that analyze the social reproduction of inequality in terms of discrepancies between parental style and the culture of the school. It also raises questions about the Foucauldian perspective which regards policies and practices of parental collaboration as means to govern parents. Through a discussion of these analyses, the article shows how different ways of conceptualizing parental collaboration offer different opportunities for organizing collaboration and dealing with the historical problems of the school.