Pm Greenhough

Boxes, bags and videotape: enhancing home-school communication through knowledge exchange activities

Effective two‐way communication between home and school has been frequently promoted by policy‐makers and educationalists in the UK and elsewhere. In practice, however, home–school communication can often resemble ‘one way traffic’ which makes little attempt to acknowledge the out‐of‐school lives of children and their families. This paper argues for a different approach which aims to recognise and exchange ‘funds of knowledge’ between teachers, parents and children. The paper describes in detail two home–school knowledge exchange activities—one in which the exchange of knowledge is from school‐to‐home and one in which it is from home‐to‐school. In the discussion, it is argued that activities like these can provide a genuine exchange of ‘funds of knowledge’ between home and school. At the same time, home–school knowledge exchange activities cannot be seen as the simple transmission of depersonalised knowledge from one party to another. Instead they need to be seen as complex communicative activities in which the participants actively represent their practices and interests, and interpret these representations in terms of their own particular purposes and agendas. Two processes of ‘personalisation’ and ‘curricularisation’ appear to be involved here, as are underlying issues of power and control, risk and threat.

Getting engaged: possibilities and problems for home–school knowledge exchange

In this paper we report some of the literacy and numeracy actions developed on the Home School Knowledge Exchange (HKSE) project and examine these in relation to the engagement of participants. The exchanges of knowledge included two‐way processes where aspects of childrens out‐of‐school worlds informed teaching and learning in the classroom as well as the more usual sharing of knowledge about school with childrens families. We comment on patterns of parental engagement and on the development of actions that built not only on parental knowledge but also on the agency of the child. A key implication of this work is that ‘one size does not fit all’—more successful actions include different family members at different times and in different ways. Although the positive potential of home–school knowledge exchange for engagement is discussed, the difficulties and complexities of this field are recognized and explored.

We Do It A Different Way At My School

This chapter draws on Wenger’s (1998) account of communities of practice to provide insights into the relationship between home and school mathematics practices and identities. The chapter presents and analyses an interaction between a 9-year-old boy and his mother as she attempts to help him with a mathematics homework task, consisting of a sheet of two-digit subtraction problems. The analysis reveals considerable tension and conflict at the boundary between home and school practices, as the different identities of mother and child negotiate with and challenge each other. These conflicts are exemplified by arguments about the appropriate methods for carrying out the subtractions, in which both participants justify their positions in terms of power and legitimacy instead of the underlying mathematical principles. One implication is that schools need to reconceptualise their approach to homework and parents’ role in supporting homework if such interactions are to be more supportive of children’s mathematics learning.