Routine Communication between Teachers and Parents from Minority Groups: An Endless Misunderstanding?

The family--school relationship develops largely during face-to-face interactions between parents and teachers. Research shows that reciprocal and informal communication reinforces collaboration, especially between schools and families from minority groups. Yet, teacher practices regularly express a reluctance to implement reciprocal communication. In this article, we seek to get a better understanding of the reasons why practices in the field tend to differ from those recommended by research. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in one Swiss school in which we analyse within a context of cultural diversity how teachers and parents negotiate their roles while building their relationship, we investigate how they approach initiative-taking in informal routine interactions throughout the child's first school year. The results of our qualitative inductive analysis show a general paradox with negative implications for the building of the family--school relationship. While teachers adopt a "no news is good news" communication principle and attribute the responsibility of initiating interactions to parents, in our study parents not only expect teachers to take the initiative with interactions, but also face different structural and socio-psychological obstacles that prevent them from initiating interactions. Teachers' lack of awareness of those barriers reinforces their deficit-orientated view of parents from minority groups, in which the absence of initiative is considered evidence of lack of interest in their child's schooling. From an equity perspective, we conclude that schools and teachers need to rethink their role in routine communication, by working on removing the barriers to parental initiative which particularly disadvantage parents from minority groups.