“They Want a Reply Immediately!” Teachers’ Perceptions About Contact Between Home and School

Abstract

In many countries today, there is emphasis on teachers’ interaction with parents. Also, parents are expected to be involved in their children’s schooling. Teacher education, however, has been criticized for not preparing the prospective teachers sufficiently for the task. International studies have found on the one hand that digital technology facilitates teachers' communication with guardians, and on the other hand that communication via email risks leading to negative consequences. The aim of this study is to explore how the contact between home and school is perceived from a group of Swedish teachers’ perspective. The empirical material consists of questionnaires directed to schoolteachers. In this paper, we analyse how teachers have answered open-ended questions posed in the questionnaire. The teachers report that it has become much more common for parents to contact them, in particular via email, and parents expect teachers to be available for them and respond quickly. The teachers try to establish their own individual guidelines for how to handle parental contacts. Our conclusion is that collegial cooperation could facilitate the teachers’ tasks involving parents, and that teacher education should address the issue of how to combine good working conditions with a professional approach and good relations with the parents.

Keywords

• parental contacts; parental involvement; parental engagement
• parent-teacher relationship
• school-home cooperation

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