- Title
- Parents and teachers: partners in research
- Creator
- McLeod, Julie Hinde
- Relation
- PRAR/CARN 2005: International Practitioner Research Conference & Collaborative Action Research Network Conference. Local Research, Global Community: Action Research for a New Century (CARN Bulletin 11A) (Utrecht, The Netherlands 4-6 November, 2005)
- Relation
- http://www.prar2005.nl
- Relation
- http://www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/carnnew/conferences.php
- Publisher
- CARN / Manchester Metropolitan University
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2006
- Description
- Despite the rhetoric of legislators, educators and organized parent bodies advocating the establishment of partnerships between parents and teachers to support children’s learning, the reality of the school and the classroom reveals that such partnerships have been difficult to achieve and have often remained essentially tokenistic. This paper examines pictures of parent/teacher partnerships and establishes that, where reality most closely approximates rhetoric, there is an acknowledgement of parents’ knowledge as an essential supplement to teachers’ knowledge in enabling children’s construction of meaning. In these contexts successful partnerships between parents and teachers are collaborative, mutually empowering, and responsive to contextualised need. A collaborative action research model is constructed which aims to facilitate the development of further successful parent / teacher partnerships. This model is initially implemented through a regionally focused project involving parents and teachers researching children’s oral language and early literacy. The model is then implemented through a series of projects where parents and teachers undertake collaborative action research within the context of their community school to address a contextualised need. The model is shown to have the potential to create and support partnerships between parents and teachers that are collaborative, empowering and responsive to different action contexts. Finally, this paper examines how the collaborative action research model and its outcomes have been incorporated within teacher education programs where the aim is the foster in beginning teachers an awareness of the potential of partnership with parents and strategies to facilitate effective partnerships.
- Subject
- collaborative action research; parents and teachers; teacher education
- Identifier
- uon:2601
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/29660
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781905476084
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