| Abstract: | ABSTRACT This article examines practices and products of school culture: jokes, hallway conversations, home-school correspondence and interpersonal interactions between parents and teachers. These practices construct parents as functionally, but not critically, literate and serve to reproduce a dominant ideology which presumes a hierarchical relationship between teachers and parents with professional thought and practice superior to parents' in educational matters. Examples of parental and professional resistance to such disempowering constructions of parental literacies are offered to demonstrate possibilities for the development of a more just and literate community. |
