<p>That parents should be a part in their children’s education is something that we educationalist wish for the future. Research show that if you have a good relation between parents and school, it can help a student's educational process. In this study I have concentrated on the Swedish minority group Roma. The study is qualitative and based on interviews with Roma. The goal of my study has been that with hermeneutics perspectives analyse some Romani parent’s experiences of their children schools. I have interviewed a mother who sent her children to a class who had only Romani students. I have also made a group interview with 15 students between 22-28 years of age, which have children in the ordinary Swedish schools. In my results I have come to the conclusion that the schools in general should get more education about the Romani culture and history so that mainstream students can understand the situation of the Romani minority in the society today. To spread knowledge of the Romani culture would be an important issue to get a revised picture about the Romani minority and to change the general view that people today still have about the Roma. </p>

That parents should be a part in their children’s education is something that we educationalist wish for the future. Research show that if you have a good relation between parents and school, it can help a student's educational process. In this study I have concentrated on the Swedish minority group Roma. The study is qualitative and based on interviews with Roma. The goal of my study has been that with hermeneutics perspectives analyse some Romani parent’s experiences of their children schools. I have interviewed a mother who sent her children to a class who had only Romani students. I have also made a group interview with 15 students between 22-28 years of age, which have children in the ordinary Swedish schools. In my results I have come to the conclusion that the schools in general should get more education about the Romani culture and history so that mainstream students can understand the situation of the Romani minority in the society today. To spread knowledge of the Romani culture would be an important issue to get a revised picture about the Romani minority and to change the general view that people today still have about the Roma.

This article is a working paper presenting a network building cooperative project between Umeå University inSweden and Zhejiang University in China. The project focuses on parents’ involvement and home-schoolcollaboration in Sweden and China and has an ambition to entail a set of empirical objectives: (1) to map andcompare the systems, policies, curricula, and resources dealing with home-school collaboration in Sweden andChina at the national level; (2) to identify and analyze the similarities and differences in the definitions, foci,models, practices, and perspectives on home-school collaboration in the two countries at the local level; and (3) toidentify and seek out good examples and models from both countries for communication and interaction amongteachers, parents, and students. Following an introduction to the project design where a comparative case-studyapproach is presented, this article reviews policies and researches concerning home-school collaboration inSwedish and Chinese contexts. Cases from both countries are selected, described, and discussed. Relative issues forfurther study are suggested. / Establishing research network between Sweden and China on cooperation between home and school

This research studies the effectiveness of teaching art appreciation to home schooled children ages 10-17 through a DBAE curriculum in pinhole photography via a weekend workshop. An autoethnographic approach to recording data about the students’ learning and my experience as their teacher was used in the research. Data was recorded as journal notes during and after each workshop from my experiences as their teacher and analyzed according to a grounded theory based on open coding. The workshop was open for registration of up to 25 home schooled students of any race, male or female, from the ages of 10 - 17. While the research reports a successful change in students’ appreciation of photography as a result of the workshop, parental values proved to be both an obstacle and area of potential future research.

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.

The purpose of this study was both to determine the most popular art curricula used by home-schooled students in Georgia and also to access whether or not these curricula align with State and National Standards for art education as well as current trends in the field. This research was approached from a document analysis standpoint and individual curriculum documents were examined and evaluated. Seven curricula/teaching resources were identified as the most popular in the state of Georgia and these were evaluated individually to identify themes, which were then compared to themes present in the National and State Standards for art education. While there was some overlap in themes from the curricula examined and the State and National Standards, it was determined that on the whole the curricula made no concerted effort to adhere to these standards.

The purpose of this embedded mixed methods collective case study was to explore eight kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers’ experiences partnering with families of their students who are at risk for emotional or behavioral disorders (EBDs). The teachers worked in two high-poverty, non-accredited Title-1 schools in an urban city. The study was part of a federally funded intervention called Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Training: Competent Learners Achieving School Success (BEST in CLASS- Elementary; BiC-E; Sutherland et al., 2017), which is targeted for students at risk for the development of EBDs. It uses evidence- based instructional practices to decrease students’ problem behaviors and increase their engagement. Teachers had BiC-E coaches help them implement a Home-School Partnership manual and process with 1 to 2 families of students at risk for EBDs. The teachers completed pretest measures, followed by a collection of weekly coaching reports for 15 weeks, then posttest measures and posttest interviews were conducted. The study intended to (a) learn more about teachers’ perspectives of partnering with families of their most challenging student and (b) help expand the literature about home-school partnership strategies for teachers to use with their families of students at risk for EBD. Mixed methods analyses revealed three keys to teachers’ successes in partnering with families: a) using the Home-School Partnership process with the CARES Framework encouraged more than just communication, it built empathy, cultural awareness, and effective communication strategies, b) presence of coaches promoted family- teacher partnerships, and c) encouragement of a partnership approach for teachers and families underscored the strengths both partners provided. A conceptual framework illustrated the complicated nature of these partnerships and underscored further study of this under-studied topic. Themes from the qualitative components shed light on the importance of congruence in the roles and expectations for both families and teachers in the partnership. Implications for policy and practice are discussed. Findings help inform the scant literature on targeted home- school partnership processes for teachers and families of students at risk for EBD.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether middle school students’ perceptions of teacher interactions and home-school dissonance are predictors of school attachment. The study sought to determine if there were differences in students’ perceptions of teacher interactions and home-school dissonance based on ethnicity, gender and/or grade level. This investigation is one of the first to explore the association between these variables. Data for this investigation was obtained from a larger study where surveys were administered to over 800 racially diverse students in grades 6 through 8 in Language Arts classrooms in two public middle schools with diverse student populations. Participants completed the Questionnaire of Teacher Interactions (QTI), the Cultural Discontinuity Between Home and School Scale (CDBHSS) and the School Attachment Questionnaire (SAQ). Based on the study sample, the QTI and SAQ were revalidated and produced new scale structures. Results of the multiple regressions, multivariate analysis of variance and post hoc tests revealed middle school students’ perceptions of teacher interactions and home-school dissonance significantly predict school attachment. Teacher interactions perceived as critical/passive, pleasant, or demanding were those making significant contributions. Student perceptions of pleasant teacher interactions were the greatest predictor of school attachment. Eighth graders perceived teachers to be more critical/passive than sixth graders. Sixth grade students perceived teachers to be more caring than seventh and eighth grades. Further, results indicated African American students perceived more critical/passive teacher interactions than their Caucasian and Asian American peers. While results indicate that home-school dissonance is a significant predictor of school attachment, results show that the impact of students’ perceptions of home-school dissonance is minimized when combined with teacher interactions. Implications for administrators, teachers, and university education departments are outlined. Recommendations for future research are also discussed.

Paper One: Developing positive relationships between schools and families has become an increasing priority within education in order to best support children and young people’s learning and development. Despite an increasing focus on seeking the parental ‘voice’, the views and experiences of school staff, parents and children appear to have limited prominence within the literature. This paper presents a piece of illuminative Community Psychology research that explored home-school relationships from the perspectives of school staff, parents and children from four Primary schools in a local community. A mixed-methods approach to data collection involved twenty-eight staff and sixty-four parent questionnaires, a focus group with eight children, and semi-structured research interviews with six staff and five parents. The importance of effective communication to encourage home and school to ‘work together’ is highlighted along with the need to provide support tailored to local needs focused around developing parental knowledge and skills to support children’s learning. The findings offer valuable insights into the views and experiences of parents, school staff and children around the current communication and engagement practices of schools in a local community. There are also implications for educational practice, including within Educational Psychology, in developing more effective home-school relationships in the future. Paper Two: With an increasing focus on supporting parental involvement within education, the development of effective ‘partnerships’ between schools and families is widening. Despite the wealth of information and advice around engaging parents in education (DfE, 2011), there appears limited training and ongoing support for school staff on how to foster and maintain these positive interactions and how to tackle ‘real life’ issues faced within home-school relationships. This research explored the role of a Community Educational Psychologist working with school staff to develop and maintain positive home-school relationships. Through support and facilitation from a Trainee Community Educational Psychologist, a series of education and supervision sessions were developed with a group of school staff to increase knowledge and confidence around the applications of psychology within education and the influential factors in home-school interactions. A model of reflection was introduced through the supervision sessions to assist the creation of a sustainable support network for staff within school concerning their work with families. The findings highlighted a ‘need to’ and ‘desire for’ developing school staff knowledge and confidence and the significant impacts of the education/supervision sessions in achieving this. Factors enabling and preventing progress through these sessions were noted along with the value of ‘sharing’ within supervision. The necessity of continued practice in order to embed supervision into teaching practice was acknowledged, and the positive impact of a Community Educational Psychologist facilitating these groups was found. Implications for educational practice, including within Educational Psychology, in supporting school staff with home-school relationships are discussed.

Thesis advisor: Diana Pullin / Parents are the primary educators of their children and the consistent teachers throughout their lives. However, with raised expectations through curriculum state standards and high stakes testing for students, teachers and schools, families are being left behind. A particular turning point in students' education is during the middle school years when intellectual, character, social and emotional transitions occur and habits are formed. Therefore, this qualitative, single case study uses data sources of interviews, observations and artifacts to determine the appropriate role of parents at the middle school level as perceived by administrators, teachers with administrative duties, teachers and parents. Additionally, this research sought to determine the unique factors that impede more effective partnerships between home and school and analyze the current situation using the sociocultural theory to determine if beliefs and values match the social structures in place at this particular school and provide implications for practice. Findings reveal the parent role is defined by consistent communication between home and school for unified adult expectations. Unique factors impeding parent participation at this level are based on this particular age of the students. Using sociocultural theory, it is evident that the school community culture prevails over individual beliefs and is impeded by two underlying sub cultures of rationalizations and assumptions, which allow participation to remain infrequent. There are additional overarching issues discussed that go beyond sociocultural theory. Finally, recommendations for practice are made for this particular school and the middle school level. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Administration and Higher Education.