Abstract
The study shows how explanations for school success are expressed and dialogically constructed during teacher–parent conferences at school. Attribution theory is used to conceptualize the various explanations for school success that were expressed. However, instead of only looking at attributions as beliefs which individuals or groups ‘have’, the aim of this study is to show how attributions are part of co-constructed processes in which multiple partners impact upon each other’s attributions over the course of a conversation. The results indicated that in the conversations between teachers and minority parents, school performance is more often attributed to effort while in conversations with majority parents, psychological attributions were more common. Besides these differences in content, the process through which these accounts were constructed was different. While the diagnosis on what went wrong was more commonly constructed in case of the conversations with majority parents, they were more characterised by opposition or a passive position by the parent in case of the conversations with minority parents. The analyses show that instead of a simple mismatch between explanations of the home and the school, these explanations are interactionally co-constructed as both parents and teachers necessarily ‘re’-act on each other’s claims and understanding of school success. The results ultimately reveal how the interactive process impacted upon the construction of the attributions and the possibilities this creates for partnerships between parents and teachers to create an understanding of the child’s academic potential across home and school.
Highlights
The study shows how explanations for school success are expressed and dialogically constructed during teacher–parent conferences at school
Given the notion in the literature that school success is differently accounted for in case of minority children as compared to how this is done for majority children, the study focusses on how school success is differently explained between teachers and parents with an ethnic minority background as compared to between teachers and parents with an ethnic majority background
If we focus on the educational setting and the attribution of school success as related to ethnic status, the literature shows that minority parents usually have higher expectations and aspirations (Coenen 2001; Müller and Kerbow 1993; Nijsten and Pels 2000; Phalet and Schönpflug 2001) as compared to majority parents and that teachers generally seem to have lower expectations for minority children than for majority children (e.g. Van Ewijk 2009; Weinstein et al 2002; Hall et al 1986)
Summary
The study shows how explanations for school success are expressed and dialogically constructed during teacher–parent conferences at school. Many studies focussed on teachers’ and parents’ differential expectations, possible differences in the attributions teachers (or parents) make for the performances of majority and minority children did not receive as much attention It can be expected based on these studies that teachers will attribute school success of ethnic minority children less often to high ability (as compared to majority children) and that minority parents, given their higher expectations, will attribute school success more to (a lack of) effort. This lack of attention for attribution is remarkable, since attributions can give more substantive insight into the reasons behind differential expectations (i.e. as attributions were theorized to underlie expectancy levels). This study fills in this gap by studying if teachers and parents employ different attributions for the school success of minority children as compared to majority children
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