Strategies to promote family participation in child education in Chilean schools

Abstract

Regarding family-school relationship, benefits have been studied more than the strategies to promote it. For this reason, this paper intends to explore the vision that principals have of parental participation in education and describe the strategies implemented in their schools, by conducting interviews with the principals of twenty-nine public elementary schools in the Metropolitan Area, Chile. The results show high expectations towards the families in the definition of participation, at the same time as a critical evaluation of the condition in which the family is in their schools. I also describe the strategies implemented, including: festivities, recreation and celebration of the families; formal places of meeting with families, teachers and principals; activities of integral formation of parents; home visits of the social workers to the families; and the use of technologies of information and communication as a way to get closer to the families. These strategies are discussed in the light of the model of parental participation by Joyce Epstein (2011). Conclusion is that the strategies the schools implement to promote the relation with the families are limited, traditional and they do not recognize the plurality of family structures, as the strategies do not follow the changes in Chilean society. Instead of what is proposed for the model of Epstein, in studied schools, there are no references to practices relative to voluntary work of parents and teachers, to strategies of collaboration with the community.