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Beth Graue

February 2006

Teachers-to-be enter their professional programs with strongly held ideas about home-school relations. Students’ early family experiences shape their notions of good parenting, roles and responsibilities, and their future involvement with families once they enter the teaching profession. Despite the importance and complexity of home-school relations, however, teacher preparation rarely addresses this subject. The gap is puzzling, says UW-Madison education professor Beth Graue.

Graue interviewed students preparing for careers as elementary school educators to find out how their personal biographies of home-school relations shaped their orientations toward working with families. She drew from cognitive, cultural, and narrative approaches to teacher development to understand the power of teacher beliefs in teacher education.

Students said they valued teacher knowledge over parental knowledge. In their view, parents’ knowledge lacked professional status. They saw it as having a limited foundation and as being inherently biased in favor of individuals. In contrast, students viewed teacher knowledge as built on all the tools they hoped to gain through education and experience. Through their work with large numbers of children, early career teachers expected that they would become objective; through their professional training, they would develop the clinical tools of teaching; through experience, they would develop a teaching self that made them professional.

These prospective teachers recognized the value of listening to parents’ views, yet they considered their own professional opinions inherently more objective, valid, and equitable than those of parents. They saw their status as professionals as the key to their authority, distancing them from parent-partners through everything their teacher education promised—knowledge and experience.

Graue says prospective teachers must cross traditional cultural boundaries of race, class, and gender. They also must move from being a child in a family and a student in school to being a professional teacher in the classroom. The role of teacher education, Graue says, is to manage the “identity work” necessary to integrate the tools of biography and the process of learning to relate to others in a new role.

New tools for knowing families

Students must learn to analyze critically their own experiences as students within families in home-school relationships, with attention to the relational identities that provided access to some resources and outcomes and not others.

Home-school relations can be addressed in multiple parts of a teacher education program. One approach—using the theater as a model—would be to have prospective teachers create the “backstory” for their conception of home-school relations. Backstories provide the history behind a story, the past events that set the stage for today’s “script.” Creating, sharing, and critiquing backstories across the professional development program could heighten attention to the ways the past shapes practice.

Prospective teachers also would benefit from experiences in understanding other identities. Key to this process is understanding how roles are located in social, cultural, and historical frameworks. Even an act as simple as thinking as a parent rather than as a teacher can offer a new perspective on the imagined world of schooling. This was traceable in the views of prospective teachers who participated in Graue’s study and were parents themselves.

Making attention to home-school relations part of field placements would be another way of addressing the gap in teacher preparation identified by Graue. Field curricula might be situated in nontraditional locations frequented by parents (e.g., after-school programs). Assignments could focus attention on teacher practices that link home and school.

Without more explicit attention to building relationships with families, teachers have little to draw on but their own experiences. Graue encourages teacher educators to develop educational components to their programs that provide broader awareness of the issues families face in schooling, theoretical perspectives for understanding interaction between home and school, and focused attention to developing strategies for improved home-school relations.

Graue hopes that the insights provided by her study might help generate greater understanding—even beyond the teacher education community—of the fragility of home-school relations and the need for a more permeable boundary between home and school.

Material in this article appeared in different form in the paper, “Theorizing and Describing Preservice Teachers’ Images of Families and Schooling,” in Teachers College Record, vol. 17, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 157-185.