Enacting Citizenship in Diverse School-Home Collaboration

Research has shown how migrant parents of school-aged children are met by racialised pathologising discourses (Padovan-Özdemir & Moldenhawer 2016) restricting their agency and marginalising their contributions to institutionalised school-home collaboration (Theodoru 2007). This paper has a critical-constructive ambition of advancing these findings. Drawing on Berg and Peltola’s (2015) notion of respectable parenting as normatively regulated and desired by all parents, this paper explores educators’ and migrant parents’ experiences and thoughts about respectable parenting in a Danish context of school-home collaboration. Additionally, the paper discusses how educators’ and migrant parents’ collaborative problem-solving enables migrant parents’ enacting citizenship and sense of empowerment. The analysis is based on an intervention-based ethnography (Joseph 2010) including participant observations and interviews with educators and migrant parents participating in a four-day cocreation process facilitated by the research team. The paper shows how the co-creation process and methods repositioned migrant parents as resourceful and agentic. However, the educator dominated problem discourse was maintained and the migrant parents’ attempts at critique were marginalised. Hence, the paper argues that the organisation of diverse school-home collaboration should allow for difference in respectable parenting as a pre-condition for migrant parents’ enacting citizenship and contributing equally to the collaboration.