Disrupting Racialized Institutional Scripts: Toward Parent–Teacher Transformative Agency for Educational Justice

Abstract

Partnerships between teachers and parents from nondominant communities hold promise for reducing race- and class-based educational disparities, but the ways families and teachers work together often fall short of delivering systemic change. Racialized institutional scripts provide “taken-for-granted” norms, expectations, and assumptions that constrain marginalized families and educators in exercising collective agency to disrupt educational inequities. In this paper, we bring together the concept of institutional scripts from organizational theory with transformative agency from sociocultural learning theories to address the moment-to-moment interactions between families and educators that may rewrite racialized institutional scripts and expand collective parent–teacher identities. Drawing examples from a parent–educator participatory design-based research project, we highlight how collaborative activity might (a) reframe expertise, (b) surface and examine contradictions, and (c) attend to power in relational dynamics in order to expand identities and interactions in the presence of racial, cultural, and class differences across roles. We argue that examining parent–teacher activity through these lenses opens possibilities for building parent–teacher relations toward collective agency and critical solidarities toward educational justice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Dr. Rodney Ogawa, Dr. Jennifer Russell, Dr. Megan Bang, and the SMAHRTies for their invaluable feedback and insights.

Notes

1 Although beyond the focus of this paper, there also exists the trope of the problematic “helicopter” parent who oversteps boundaries (e.g., white, highly educated, professional parent). This racialized script has come to be associated with what a growing number of critical scholars have referred to as “opportunity hoarding” behaviors that seek to maintain inequities in educational systems that preference or privilege their own children's competitive advantage (Lewis & Diamond, 2015; Oakes & Lipton, 2002). Interestingly, this identity shares with other parent scripts a problematic positioning related to challenging professional authority, albeit in this case, the power asymmetries with teachers and other educators can be reversed (Freidus, 2016; Posey, 2012).

2 All names of districts, schools, and individuals are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann M. Ishimaru

Ann M. Ishimaru is Associate Professor of Educational Policy, Organizations, and Leadership at the University of Washington's College of Education. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of leadership, school–community relations, and educational equity in PreK–12 systems. She is a principal investigator of the Family Leadership Design Collaborative and the Organizational Leadership for Equity Research Project.

Sola Takahashi

Sola Takahashi is a Senior Research Associate II at WestEd, where she leads the work of integrating continuous improvement methods in the coaching, technical assistance, and research conducted in partnership with education organizations. Sola was previously at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where she led the development of analytic systems in Networked Improvement Communities. She received her Ed.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.