Trevor Cairney

Beyond the Classroom Walls: the rediscovery of the family and community as partners in education

Teachers have been aware of the influence of home on school success for a long time. However, in the last decade we have seen a significant increase in the interest of educational researchers, educational authorities and individual teachers in the relationship between home, school and community. In this paper I want to set this emerging interest in its historical context and challenge readers to consider this topic through multiple, and more diverse and appropriate lenses. I want to argue that there is a need to look closely at the nature of the relationship between home and school and to deconstruct the purposes that drive these initiatives. There is a need to examine the many claims about the relationship between home and school, and to critique the deficit views that have driven much of this interest. However, rather than just to critique, I want to explore alternative more responsive models for developing partnerships between home and school, and use literacy practices as one way to illustrate some of the options available.

School climate and leadership: research into three secondary schools

Draws on the findings of a major research project funded by the New South Wales Department of School Education in Australia which sought to examine the school‐community interface and communication in government comprehensive high schools in that state. Data were drawn initially from nine schools in Western Sydney with three of these schools being the subject of in‐depth follow‐up study. These studies revealed the significant role played by senior school executives, particularly the principal, in the development of communication methods in schools and their influence on school culture and climate. Examines decision making and communication methods in the three schools within the context of each school′s environment and draws implications for school leadership, staff morale, and staff, student and community attitudes. A key finding is that there is no “recipe” for success as a principal. Rather, a contingency approach is advocated whereby individual principals adopt a personal position across a range of imp...

Acknowledging Diversity in Home Literacy Practices: Moving Towards Partnership with Parents

Parent involvement in their childrens literacy learning has long been recognized as an important factor in school success. As a result, schools have frequently attempted to build programs that assist parents to support their childrens literacy. Unfortunately, many of these initiatives are based on deficit views of learning and fail to acknowledge the diverse background and needs of all children. In this paper the author provides an overview of major initiatives in family literacy, and argues for a fundamental change in the way schools relate to the parents and the community. It is suggested that schools and communities need to develop more effective partnerships that provide the opportunity for parents and teachers to develop a greater sense of shared understanding. The author argues that such initiatives will encourage parents and teachers to enter into dialogue based on a shared commitment to improving childrens learning, and that this will lead to positive outcomes for all students.

Three families, multiple discourses : parental roles, constructions of literacy and diversity of pedagogic practice

To understand more fully what it means to be literate, we need to consider the people who use literacy and how it is constructed, defined and supported in varied contexts. In this paper, we share part of an ongoing research project that has sought to understand the sociolinguistic complexity of literacy practices at home and school for a number of specific families. This study examines the discourse practices of members of three families as they engage in shared reading activities. The families are unique both socially and culturally, and construct meanings about literacy according to their own ways of experiencing and using it. As well, they engage in sociolinguistic practices to support literacy learning and further their children’s educational opportunities. The data discussed was gathered as part of a large-scale study involving multiple ethnographies (Cairney & Green, 1997). The paper reports on an exploration of the nature of literacy practices in three diverse families. Specifically, it looks at the discourse practices families engage in as they support children’s literacy understanding during shared story reading events. These events were examined to explore how the definitions of literacy implicitly held by parents and the roles they adopted in supporting their children, impacted on the literacy discourse practices of home story reading events. Our discourse analysis of shared reading events indicated that while two families relied on implicit understandings of literacy that shared much in common, the strategies employed in supporting shared reading varied quite significantly. Furthermore, our analysis showed that while such events could be examined in terms of the cognitive support that parents offered, this in no way explained the complexity of what parents were doing as they supported their children’s literacy learning. What our analysis demonstrates is that the sociolinguistic complexity of literacy support that adults offer, makes it difficult (indeed unwise) to make simplistic statements concerning differences across literacy contexts, or even repeated occurrences of the same type of literacy event within a single context. Hence, one could assume that where there is congruence between the pedagogical practices found at home and at school, this must also reflect a degree of intersubjectivity, developed through the parents’ own experience of school, parent education programs and involvement in children’s education. However, our work shows that without greater attention to the discourse practices, the picture is at best incomplete. Detailed discourse analysis of the kind we have undertaken offers us the power to look more deeply at the sociolinguistic strategies that are being employed. This in turn offers us opportunities to identify how pedagogical practices need to change both in the home and at school in order to more fully support all students as literacy users.