It starts with your heart and radiates out: building democratic parental participation in schools

Abstract

The This Participatory Action Research project focuses on how one Parent Teacher Association (PTA) collaborated to build democratic parental participation in their urban public elementary school in a gentrifying neighborhood. When white middle-class parents founded the PTA, there was a danger of alienating and displacing families with generational ties to the majority Latino school. This study was inspired by the PTAâ€s goal to become more welcoming, inclusive, and representative. It began with individual interviews to recruit parents to a collaborative research team, who then wrote, conducted, and analyzed a parent survey and group interviews in both English and Spanish. The collaborative research team then presented what they had learned to the PTA Board, who used these lessons to inform their future work. Both within the collaborative research team and between researchers and participants, developing relationships with parents from different backgrounds facilitated self-reflection and analysis of power dynamics in the community. The PTA learned that parents want to partner with educators to provide a rigorous and well-rounded educational experience for their children, but that the conditions in the school and PTA are not always conducive to their participation. Improving representation within the PTA better aligned the organization to the needs of the entire community; a prerequisite for parents to collectively advocate for students and the school. The PTA has made significant improvements through this process of collaborative inquiry, though there is still work to be done to continue building democratic parental participation in the school.