Dealing with transition in formal meetings of parents and pedagogic staff

ABSTRACT

Talking about a specific child’s development and current issues is an organisationally integral part of the partnership between parents / families and educational institutions with respect to children’s upbringing and education. In Germany, the programmatic emphasis on the equality of all participants in annual formal meetings of parents and pedagogic staff in early childhood education results in a double-bind situation between safeguarding a child’s well-being, the staff’s authority and professionalism, and families’ claims, hopes, knowledge and expectations. By analysing these formal meetings using the ‘documentary method’ (Bohnsack, R. 2017. Praxeologische Wissenssoziologie. Opladen, Toronto: Budrich), we qualitatively and longitudinally reconstruct how staff and parents outline transitions among children with special needs in inclusive settings. The article implements a perspective of ‘doing transitions’ (Wanka, A., M. Rieger-Ladich, B. Stauber, and A. Walther. 2020. “Doing Transitions: Perspektiven und Ziele einer reflexiven Übergangsforschung.” In Reflexive Übergangsforschung. Theoretische Grundlagen und methodologische Herausforderungen, edited by A. Walther, B. Stauber, M. Rieger-Ladich, and A. Wanka, 11–36. Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich) and shows how the reconstructed discourse characteristics of problematisation and de-problematisation work together in terms of safeguarding.

KEYWORDS:

• educational partnership
• formal meetings
• transition
• qualitative research
• inclusive education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Together with my colleagues Prof. Dr. Peter Cloos and Isabell Krähnert, we are analysing parent meetings with respect to the following questions: What understandings of inclusion and transition are made manifest in parent meetings? How are colliding interests dealt with in situ? And how does the upbringing and educational partnership relate to transition and inclusion?

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Department of Education under Grant [number 01NV1716].