Strategic discourse production and parent involvement: including parent knowledge and practices in the Lead My Learning campaign

ABSTRACT

Parent involvement in a child’s education is usually viewed as integral for building educational participation. Critical work has examined the complexity of issues that work to exclude certain social and cultural ‘groups’, as well as practices that can work to build inclusion. This article sets out to contribute to the latter by examining how an approach we term strategic discourse production offers possibilities for practices of subjectivation that can deviate from the dominant discourse that portray parents who experience educational disadvantage as ‘not involved’ or ‘not engaged’ in their children’s learning. Drawing on Foucault’s work on practices of subjectivation, the article outlines the adaptation of social marketing techniques to create strategic discourse production. The article discusses Lead My Learning, an example of strategic discourse production that was guided by Australian Aboriginal Protocols. By drawing on Foucault’s concepts of subjectivation and procedures of truth as well as his work on subjugated knowledges, strategic discourses of parental involvement in their children’s education were produced. The article argues that this creates possibilities for an otherwise to be articulated, for parents to experience practices of subjectivation that prompt possibilities for forms of avowal that articulate their inclusion in the learning of their children.

KEYWORDS:

• Poverty and education; subjectivation; parent involvement; Foucault

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Valerie Harwood http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6359-1384

Nyssa Murray http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9942-4799

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT130101332].