The Barrier of the Child and Parent Expected Models for Entering the School System — A Secondary Publication

Abstract

The recognition of the positive value of student diversity and their right to full participation are key aspects of inclusion as a means of managing heterogeneity of the school population from an equality perspective. As the school cannot welcome the diversity of children without including their families, the same logic needs to apply to the relationship between the school and parents, particularly in the current environment where the school-family partnership appears as a privileged institutional leverage in the fight against inequalities at school. Based on an ethnographical study exploring how the relationship between the school and the families builds up in a Swiss school located in a context of strong cultural diversity, this paper interrogates how the school norm can be the main limitation to the inclusion of students and parents who are unfamiliar with the school. Derived from field observations and interviews, our results show how the teachers tend to approach their relationship with new students and their parents from the standpoint of narrowly defined expected models, leading them to engage in a vain attempt to conform the students and parents when they deviate from these models. The possibility of entering the school system for students and parents unfamiliar with school is hindered by the exclusive and excluding normativity on which the models of the child and the parent expected by the teachers are grounded. Based on these observations, we discuss how an inclusive approach seems to us to require in the first place a necessary process of decentering from the school and teachers, as a condition for recognition of the actual child and parent.