What Happens After the Law is Passed? Marketing to Parent Demands in a Canadian Francophone School

ABSTRACT

Language rights embedded in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Department of Justice, 1982) and implemented in the provincial education system have allowed parents to choose French language schools over their English alternative. But creation established by law does not fully protect the continuation of such a school. The image that it presents to its school community and the wider community within which it sits is equally important because it establishes economic, as well as legal, viability. This paper addresses the marketing that a legally mandated minority-language school in Canada developed in order to foster survival in its own particular cultural and educational community. The relationship between school, parents and public at large is analyzed to illustrate the balance that the school maintained between inclusive-ness and exclusivity. Document analysis, interviews and observation, as part of a larger case study, revealed the creation of an image that addressed several different parent stakeholder groups simultaneously. This paper reports the explicit and implicit messages that a school sends its community, while it adapts to suit client needs in a legal environment of growing school choice. doi:10.1300/J467v01n03_10     

Ethnic minority students from South Asia in Hong Kong: language ideologies and discursive identity construction

This article explores how ethnic minority students in Hong Kong secondary schools discursively construct their identities in relation to culture, heritage, and social discourse. It finds that the ethnic minority students negotiate their identities within multiple positioning from parents, school, and the broader social discourse on minority languages and cultures. It also finds that they construct contradictory language ideologies when attempting to legitimate their heritage languages and to illegitimate the status of Chinese in the social context. The findings indicate that the participants tend to establish an essentialized cultural difference between their heritage culture and host culture. It argues that fixed and stereotyped views towards language practices and culture may lead to antagonistic relations between the ethnic minority students and locals, and become obstacles to their socialization and integration into the mainstream community. The implications for establishing a flexible and relational view on cultural differences and language use are explored.     

Community participation in schooling in Nepal: a disjunction between policy intention and policy implementation?

Community participation in the governance of school systems is a recurrent theme of educational reform in developed and developing countries alike. This article analyses the effort of one developing country – Nepal – to promote broader participation in educational decision-making through local school governance structure. It looks at how the current policy creates spaces for community participation in school and the extent to which a gap exists between policy intention and policy implementation. Drawing on the case study data, this article suggests that while the policy has created legitimate spaces for community participation in school, participation in such spaces is taking a form of tokenism, and the community represented in school governance is restricted to a small number of political elites. Given that ethnic, cultural, linguistic and socio-economic characteristics of the local populace, problems exist within the school system to embrace differences and diversities that prevent a majority of parents from effective participation in school. This article concludes that along with the structural reform, participation can be reinforced by developing a long-term strategy to build community capacity for the provision and management of education, as well as by preparing educators to work effectively with parents of different socio-cultural backgrounds.     

The interface of Pacific and other knowledges in a supplementary education site

Because identity (language and culture) are central to Pacific knowledge and knowledge construction processes, Pacific students’ educational experiences should be viewed through a cultural lens that sees Pacific knowledge and practices as valid and valued. This study explores the relationship between culture and educational outcomes as seen in how participation in a school Polynesian club (a cultural education supplementary site) builds youth feelings of self-esteem, identity and the confidence to connect to other educational, cultural and social spaces.     

Class,honour and reputation: gendered school choice practices in a migrant community

In this paper, I draw on a qualitative study of Iraqi-born Muslim mothers in Australia exploring how they navigate choosing secondary schools for their daughters. While the mothers interviewed for this study agreed on the importance of education and its role in facilitating upward social mobility for all their children, they articulated a specific and more complex set of concerns in relation to selecting schools for their daughters. This article suggests that families’ positions in the Australian diasporic Iraqi community are tied to girls’ schooling and, therefore, school choices are heavily gendered and contribute to a gendered structuring of family and community life. By analysing the narratives of Iraqi-born mothers, a deeper understanding emerges of the complex and varied outlooks of migrant Muslim parents on education and gender in their everyday practices of raising and educating their daughters.     

Dynamics of parent involvement at a multicultural school

This paper describes a research project that uses Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural and social capital to penetrate how middle‐class parents exercise influence and form positive relationships at the neighbourhood public school that serves various ethno‐cultural groups of students. One group of white, economically privileged students have populated the school since its founding; the others are new, immigrant, and diverse in ethnicity, race, and immigrant status. The parents of the former group of children enjoy active involvement in the school and trusting relationships with teachers that involves their differentiation from and exclusion of the new immigrant group. While the paper affirms the importance of social class differences in parent involvement, it integrates additional dimensions of immigration status and ethnicity.     

A rural math, science, and technology elementary school tangled up in global networks of practice

This is an ethnographic study of a newly created math, science, and technology elementary magnet school in a rural community fiercely committed to cultural preservation while facing unprecedented economic instability brought on by massive loss of manufacturing jobs. Our goal was to understand global- and community-level contexts that influenced the school’s science curriculum, the ways the school promoted itself to the community, and the implicit meanings of science held by school staff, parents and community members. Main sources of data were the county’s newspaper articles from 2003 to 2006, the school’s, town’s, and business leaders’ promotional materials, and interviews with school staff, parents, and community members. A key finding was the school’s dual promotion of science education and character education. We make sense of this “science with character” curriculum by unpacking the school and community’s entanglements with historical (cultural preservation), political (conservative politics, concerns for youth depravity), and economic (globalization) networks. We describe the ways those entanglements enabled certain reproductive meanings of school science (as add-on, suspect, and elitist) and other novel meanings of science (empathetic, nurturing, place-based). This study highlights the school as a site of struggle, entangled in multiple networks of practice that influence in positive, negative, and unpredictable ways, the enacted science curriculum.     

Performing Chinese Diasporic Identity through Mandarin: The Case of Italian-Schooled Chinese Migrant Youth in Prato (Italy)

Italian-schooled Chinese migrant youth in Prato enact a Chinese diasporic identity which develops as a result of the diasporic stance they manifest through Mandarin-speaking practice, in addition to other practices associated with Mandarin. Being children of Chinese migrants with limited Italian literacy, the youth speak a Chinese dialect and Mandarin with parents. Interestingly, they show a propensity to communicate in Mandarin with Italian-speaking peers when they choose to speak a variety of Chinese with them. They also seek alternative means of engaging with and learning Mandarin, even though it is not a school curriculum subject. The youth’s diasporic stance derives from being considered Other in their situated social field. In fact, their practices associated with Mandarin are strategies they implement to deal with exclusionist discourse. This finding emerged from a study of the youth’s linguistic repertoire, language practice, and discursive constructions of self. Data collection comprised questionnaire completion and oral data.     

The Culture Project: diasporic negotiations of ethnicity,identity and culture among teachers,pupils and parents in Chinese language schools

Notions of culture, ethnicity and identity are highly political (and also personally meaningful) issues within diasporic communities. Complementary schools are particularly interesting sites in this respect, as they are often set up with an explicit cultural agenda of ‘preserving’ or ‘maintaining’ ‘traditional’ culture and language within diasporic communities. In this paper, we draw on qualitative data from an ESRC funded study conducted in six Chinese complementary schools to consider how pupils (n=60), parents (n=24) and teachers (n=21) in these schools construct and negotiate issues of culture and identity. We consider the ways in which the cultural agenda of the schools is constructed and experienced, teasing out the ways in which cultural discourses and pupil identities are deployed (and resisted, reworked) within the space of Chinese schools. Finally we consider the extent to which the schools are perceived by the young people to be ‘successful’ (or not) in their efforts to make pupils feel ‘more Chinese’.     

Parents and school communities in Japan and Scotland: contrasts in policy and practice in primary schools

In this paper Japanese and Scottish cultural and ideological expectations about the role of parents and communities in schools are examined. Findings from three case studies of a Japanese school, a Scottish school and a group of Japanese parents sending their children to a Scottish school show that there are clear policy differences between the two countries. These differences reflect each country's problems and the purposes of the educational reforms that have been introduced and the different strengths and weaknesses of the two systems. The policy differences in the two systems and how these are translated into practice are examined from the perspective of parents and the wider school community. It is argued that what is missing from the policy and practice context in both countries are the resources to enable teachers, parents and other members of the community to work as equal partners.     

Voicing Resistance: Adolescent boys and the cultural practice of leisure reading

This article describes a theoretically informed methodology for eliciting the voices of adolescent boys identified by their teachers and parents as reluctant leisure time readers. Similar methods have also been used to draw out the voices of the boys’ parents to understand their efforts to guide and maintain their sons’ literacy practices, within the context of one middle class Australian school community. The concept of “voice” in our research of boys as capable but differently committed leisure time readers is informed by a socio-cultural theory that foregrounds the processes of enculturation, appropriation, and agency as fundamental to identity formation. In this regard the varied ways in which the boys in the study have taken up the reading practices valued in their families is illustrative of the mutuality of individual agency and cultural processes. In describing both the theoretical and conceptual framing of a methodology designed to investigate in particular those boys who have resisted their families’ reading dispositions we hope to highlight how individuals struggle to construct new values within patterns of cultural practice.     

Problematising school space for Indigenous education: teachers’ and parents’ perspectives

This interpretive study explores the relationship between spatial qualities and school-parent engagement in three primary schools which serve low income periurban Indigenous families in north Australia. Drawing from interviews with educators and parents, school-based observations and community fieldwork conducted over the course of two years in two different towns, we found that educators are very concerned that schools, as western institutions, present cultural and physical barriers to effective engagement; but that this view is not shared by Indigenous parents. Rather than seeing this as a simple issue of cultural difference, our analysis seeks to unravel the curious way in which the otherness of school space is acknowledged in educator discourse. Only some place features of school are suggested as a barrier by educators while other aspects – such as the clear identification of insiders and outsiders through school routines and locales – remain unremarked. We conclude by suggesting that schools are inherently exclusionary, a foundational fact which both parents and educators accept and respond to, in ways which both explain the push for engagement within education policy and its irrelevance as a concern for parents.     

Guanxi and school success: an ethnographic inquiry of parental involvement in rural China

This study examines the differential patterns of school success of rural students as a result of China’s market transition. The process dimension, how families from different social backgrounds within rural society get involved in rural schooling and how this contributes to the inequality of school success within rural society, is investigated. The data analysis suggests that schools as institutions provide few official channels for rural parents to participate in rural schools and help their children to achieve school success. This raises the importance of families’ strategic initiatives to employ guanxi within family, community and between school and family. These make the point that guanxi and their employment have become an important mechanism for social inclusion and exclusion in the competition for advantages in school success in post-socialist China.     

The dynamic role of cultural capital in the competitive school admission process: a Chinese experience

School choice in China is a parent-initiated bottom-up movement characterised by the payment of a substantial ??choice fee?? to the desired school, and parents?? positional competition through the use of cultural, social and economic capital, before and during the school choice process. This study demonstrates that Chinese middle class parents?? cultural capital and their efforts to help their children to accumulate cultural capital through after-school activities greatly increase their positional advantage in the competitive school admission process in China. The Chinese practice of acquiring cultural capital outside the family has to some extent extended the development of Bourdieu??s cultural reproduction theory. The widespread practice of such actions by middle class families clearly illustrates how cultural capital can be used to maintain social stratification by perpetuating educational inequalities that lead to unequal life opportunities for differently schooled people.     

An exploration of school communication approaches for newly arrived EAL students: applying three dimensions of organisational communication theory

This article explores the modes of school communication associated with language and cultural diversity, demonstrating how organisational communication theory can be applied to the analysis of schools’ communication responses to the presence of pupils who have English as an additional language (EAL). The article highlights three analytical dimensions: the external factors influencing school communication systems; communication models reflected in school structures; and the content of communication between stakeholders. An exploratory study of a primary and a secondary school in the East of England, involving 32 semi-structured interviews with school managers, teachers, EAL staff, parents and newly arrived Eastern European students, reveals the interactional and transactional models of communication in the primary school, while the secondary school frequently used a linear approach. Communication in both schools showed a lack of information on EAL students and their parents, hindering a sustained outreach and empowering partnership, and possibly placing these students at a disadvantage.     

Starting school in Australia is ‘a bit safer,a lot easier and more relaxing’: issues for families and children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds

The project described in this paper investigated the needs and concerns identified by parents from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds as their children started school in Sydney, Australia. Six groups of parents from Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Samoan, Turkish and Vietnamese language backgrounds were interviewed about what was important for them to know and/or do as their children started school. In particular, parents were asked to identify information which would have been helpful for them, and that should be available to parents with children starting school. The data obtained were compared with data derived from Australian parents whose first language is English. The results indicate that there are some issues which seem to be of concern to most parents, regardless of their cultural or language background, such as parents' desire for children to be happy and confident at school, as well as some more specific issues for some groups.     

Policy promise and the reality of community involvement in school-based management in Zambia: Can the rural poor hold schools and teachers to account?

Community participation in school management—and in hiring and firing of teachers in particular—has been actively advocated as an effective reform to improve school and teacher accountability in the Global South. This paper examines whether such reform functions in practice as suggested in theory, drawing on the findings of a case study of community schools in rural Zambia. Using the concept of the ‘context of practice’, efforts have been made to understand the local meanings of community participation in school management rather than that of the central government or development partners. Such analysis illuminates the important roles that local economic and cultural capital, complex cultural norms and unexpected micro politics play in shaping the way parents and communities are actually willing and able to participate in school management, and how these issues influence school and teacher accountability. The findings also underscore the difficulty that teachers face when attempting to respond to the local demands, especially in the context of grossly inadequate resources being allocated to them by the state. The paper concludes by arguing, first, that community management of schools in Zambia was an unfunded and unclear policy that shifted financial responsibility to already marginalized rural communities and, second, that direct hiring relationships between parents and teachers will dilute the importance of the political accountability of the state to ensure quality education for all.     

English or Nothing: The Impact of Rigid Language Policies on the Inclusion of Humanizing Practices in a High School ESL Program

This article discusses the results of a qualitative case study that examined how school district language policies impact humanizing practices in a high school ESL program. The theoretical framework builds on Paulo Freire's concept of humanizing pedagogy to explore policy and instruction in a secondary ESL program. Participants of this study include school district officials and high school ESL teachers. Findings indicate that when ESL teachers adhere to rigid language policies, they fail to create humanizing practices in their classrooms. In contrast, when teachers do not hold themselves strictly accountable to the institutionalized discourse of ESL, they are able to enact humanizing practices where students' linguistic and cultural resources are validated as essential for the development of academic resiliency. Paradoxically, even teachers who enact humanizing practices fail to question district language policies that render students cultural and linguistic resources invalid.