CONFERENCE DAY: Friday, July 6, 2012

Circles, squares and triangles conference day – The geometry of Family, Professional Relationships

The keynote address was with Dianne and Phil Ferguson, the instructors of our afternoon course. They bring both an academic perspective to their research and teaching about family and professional relationships and a personal perspective as parents of a disabled son. They asked the audience to come up with words to describe families with disabled children, record them in large print and hold the cards up so they could see them. Here are some of the words that the audience came up with.

They talked about their research – they have found that when family members are involved in their children’s education, the students do better. This seemed to me to be a logical given. Certainly as a teacher I believe this to be true. But my version of involvement is going to be different than what the family may want. Dianne and Phil talked about how there is a misunderstanding between schools and families about roles and responsibility, how schools tend to be involved with a small number of families, and that schools and families tend to be natural enemies. I understand this to mean that schools have certain expectations about what families are going to do for them – read with their children, supervise homework, volunteer, show up when invited – and that this relationship is largely one sided. I can see their perspective and hadn’t really thought about relationships with parents in this way before. They went on to say that teachers and families are ‘natural enemies’ – this I don’t agree with. Relationships with families can sometimes be difficult, contentious even, but I don’t view my relationship with parents as inherently adversarial.  I did agree with their assessment of the basis for the misunderstandings between schools and families. They said that the misunderstanding is based on history, cultural differences, and socio-economic class. These ‘ghosts in the classroom’ have a direct bearing on how we with educators interact with families. The afternoon session was about ‘social capital’ and the impact that class has on how schools interact with their communities. When the parents look like us, talk like us and live like us, the school and community tend to work well together, but throw in race, cultural and socio-economic differences between schools and community and the relationship is stained by these factors. I see this as a problem for schools to acknowledge and address.

Karen Dyke talked about the influence of place in education and the effects of centralization on rural communities and its affects on family and school relationships. In a shrinking word that favours urban settings, rural communities are experiencing the negative effects this trend - globalization, accessibility, breakdown of traditions, technology and the driving force of corporate methodology into every aspect of life, including school.

My overall impression to the day was that as teachers we need to keep the personal in the professional. Developing and maintaining mutually respectful relationships with families and that we need to be aware of the ‘ghosts in the classroom’ that hover around both families and school staff.