Migrant parents at high school: Exploring new opportunities for involvement

Abstract

This article examines the at-school opportunities Norwegian high schools provide for involving migrant parents in their children’s education. The legal and societal expectations of systematic school-home cooperation with all parents at this time of transition to higher education or employment are relatively new in Norway. Thus, how schools act on these expectations as they meet migrant parents is under-researched. To address this gap, interviews with four leaders of three high schools with different sociocultural profiles and observations of meetings with parents at one of the schools were conducted as a part of this study. Examined through a Bourdieusian lens, parental involvement—or rather traditional lack of at-school parental involvement outside crises—can be interpreted as a form of high-school doxa. This unquestionable truth is now challenged as more rights are granted to parents, and new heterodox beliefs and discourses about parents of adolescents at school emerge. At the same time, the schools in the focus of this study appear to have limited room for imagining forms and content of non-crisis communication with the home, especially when parents do not directly claim their rights, as is true for many migrant families. This study thus contributes to the existing research on parental involvement and home-school relations by emphasizing the need for a professional discussion on more equitable and better situated forms of engaging parents, as well as the school’s areas of responsibility in including families in educational communities.

Migrant parents’ contributions to students’ negotiations of their educational futures: A case study at a Norwegian high school

“…In the last decade, policymakers in Norway have granted parents a more powerful role in their children's education. However, my study, as well as other research in the field (Melnikova, 2022;Vincent, 2017) indicate that, especially in the case of parents disadvantaged by society and the school system, a distance from school remains.…”

“…In the interviews, the students did not seem to perceive that parents had any direct say in their choices. Neither were they, as demonstrated by the three-school case study (Melnikova, 2022), involved in negotiations happening at school with teachers or guidance counsellors. With a few exceptions, my informants-students, parents, and teachers-shared a common view of the world in which parents were not involved directly at school except in extraordinary cases.…”

Home-school Communication in Greek Secondary Multicultural Educational Settings: Parents’ and Teachers’ perspectives

“…Teachers' responses were oriented more toward the "transactional school-home-school communication model" (Schneider & Arnot, 2018, p. 11), while they expressed a more profound and interactive two-way process that would involve structuring of a common ground, acquiring knowledge upon the living conditions of students, either structural or cultural, an approach that can improve educational outcomes and construct more objective perceptions, something supported by prior literature on the field (Gross et al, 2022;McWayne et al, 2022;Henderson et al, 2020;Schneider & Arnot, 2018). Also, according to participant teachers, effective HSC entails certain strategies, such as establish channels of communication especially at the beginning of the school year (Melnikova, 2022;U.S. Department of Education, 2017).…”