Building bridges between refugee parents and schools

Abstract

This interview study examines the way practitioners in Wisconsin public schools created conditions to facilitate refugee parent involvement. Practitioners’ perceptions of barriers to refugee parents’ school involvement are explored as well as the strategies used to promote meaningful parent involvement. Interviewees included nine school practitioners who worked closely with recently arrived Hmong students. The findings of the study suggest school practitioners considered the following barriers to refugee parent involvement: (1) language proficiency; (2) time constraints due to family socio‐economic status and traditional family structures; (3) deferential attitudes towards school authority. Strategies viewed as useful to the interviewees included: (1) creating a parent liaison position; (2) tapping into existing community service organisations; (3) providing parent education programmes. While the findings illuminate ways school practitioners and policy‐makers may better facilitate transitions of recently resettled refugee students into host communities, our discussion challenges school practitioners and policy‐makers to question an absence of community control in traditional conceptions and enactments of parental involvement. Further, we raise concerns over technical rational approaches to social integration of refugee families and critique a colonial discourse of ‘helping’ these vulnerable communities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to extend their thanks and deep appreciation to Richard Halverson and Brendan D. Maxcy whose comments and suggestions on initial drafts of this manuscript were helpful in its development. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the International Journal of Leadership in Education for reading and commenting on previous drafts of this manuscript.