Reimagining the Needs of Rural Schools: Teachers’ and Parents’ Experiences of Parental Involvement in School Activities

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between parents, teachers, and the school are continuously important because of teachers’ changing social expectations. While formal education is traditionally viewed as the job of teachers, they cannot be expected to address all educational issues that are influenced by multifaceted social issues. We explore parents’ and teachers’ understanding and experiences of parental involvement, and the nature of parental involvement in rural schools. We used the phenomenological approach; semi-structured interviews were administered to comprehend teachers’ and parents’ experiences of parental involvement in school activities. Complex parental views of schooling shaped the manner of involvement in school activities, and the nature of partnerships that were imbalanced. Teachers’ discourses of parental involvement were unsurprisingly influenced by associating classroom spaces with professional qualifications and curriculum pressure, resulting in the exclusion of parents from classroom activities. The dominant nature of parental involvement that teachers mentioned was that parents’ participation was limited to helping outside the classroom to ensure the upkeep of the schools. The findings also revealed that parents’ dominant experiences relate to viewing schools as inaccessible spaces without invitation or permission, as they view themselves as outsiders, and questioned the nature of communication channels.