Parent's experience of culture with their children's schools

Parent involvement in schools increases students attendance and achievement. This intervention is most important for students from marginalized groups whose academic failure rates continue to rise despite years of programmatic attempts to ameliorate the problem. Parents are difficult to recruit and maintain in involvement programs, despite cross cultural studies that reflect strong and consistent verbal support for their children’s academic success. This research proceeds from the belief that cultural mores effect educational relationships, some of whose traditions may be inconsistent with assumptions that are built into school-designed parent programs. Phenomenological interviews with a fifteen parents were conducted in a rural mountainous community in the southeast. Through the use of non-directive techniques, the research garnered an understanding of the shared essence of the experience of parent involvement for one group of parents. Three themes were identified as making up the essential structure of the experience. The first is that parents’ experience of involvement with their children’s schools is relational, having familial overtones. The second theme identifies the goal of bringing students “up to the right level” with an emphasis on “everybody being even” among the children. The third theme conveys the importance of culture as both an underlying and conscious focus. The participants’ narratives were strongly situated in the world (the mountains) and in time (historical), manifesting in the cultural mores of the community