”Det ska funka.” Om genus betydelse i relationen hem och skola

It should work – the meaning of gender in the home school relationship

This compilation thesis examines parents’ and teachers’ approaches to curriculum objectives that involve shared responsibility between home and school regarding the children’s upbringing and education. On the basis of four articles, the meanings of good teachers, good parents, and a good cooperation practice along with the meaning of gender in home-school relationships were examined. Questions were asked from both a teacher and a parent perspective about concrete practices and constructs with respect to this cooperation. The overall aim was to conduct an exploratory study on the importance of gender in the home-school relationship.

The first article explores the use of gender and diversity in research on home and school relationships. In the second article, access to the research field of “home and school relationships” was problematized. Article 3 analyzes teachers´ and parents´ experiences regarding parents’ being resources in the primary school setting. The article focuses on what teachers expect from ”ideal” mothers and fathers as well as what parents expect from ”ideal” teachers. Article 4 analyzes the experiences that teachers and parents have with regard to the practical consequences of home and school cooperation. The theoretical starting point includes feminist poststructuralist theories and discourse analysis. Inductive qualitative interviews were executed in a mainstream district in Sweden with an increasing immigrant population; the interviewees included 25 parents and the eight teachers who taught their children. In order to interpret and to understand the meanings of the interviews, two context analyses were conducted. One involved the mapping of the local context and preconditions that surrounded the study’s informants with respect to the socio-economic context, local school plans, action plans, and management of the educational activities.

The second involved analyzing the rhetoric of governance and policy in the longer term, regarding the importance of gender in the home-school relationship with respect to the former Swedish elementary school and the current nine-year compulsory school. The thesis’ main results show that gender has great importance in homeschool relationships: Women/mothers bear the overall responsibility for engaging in cooperation, while this responsibility is largely made invisible in the research. In concrete home and school practices, the responsibility is also mostly not problematized. The study analyzes the construction of a cooperation practice that operates in two versions and affects performative practices at both home and school. Through a “mother responsibility” discourse in regard to home and school practices, mothers are expected to become teachers´ servants based on teachers´demands. The result indicates that both parents and teachers express attitudes that may raise questions regarding whether they, despite the curriculum mission to counteract traditional gender patterns, are truly dependent and reliant on a cooperation practice in which mothers are made particularly responsible and thus contribute to asymmetric gender patterns.

The study’s results are surprising, given all government interventions in the Swedish compulsory school, which, since the 1960s, have focused on gender equality through education, training, and research. Both parents and teachers viewed the cooperation practice as a practical aid in their efforts to manage their own professional roles. The conditions for cooperation are based on the fact that the dominant discourse that emphasizes female care and responsibility is never challenged. Instead, the cooperation practice focuses on supporting those processes in which women are key leaders and where male teachers and fathers have only a limited responsibility for specific activities. In order to change this gendered situation, both the structural factors on the outside as well as the gender-blind approaches on the inside must be challenged in parallel so that sufficient strength can be mobilized to counter a normalization process that is reinforced by intersecting effects.