Gary Heywood-Everett:University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom

The PAS (Parents & Schools Project)

I have some bad news and some mixed news.

First the bad: Quote ' I have to say that the thing about research is that a part of it is rubbish and another part is rather indifferent'.
The mixed news is that it was a British civil servant, Sir William Pile, who made that comment, and whilst civil servants are almost certainly out of touch with reality, they do have the ears of policy-makers in government.
My theme for this paper is problem-solving and how the creative use of problem-solving can (and does in a research project I co-ordinate) produce data which is usable, relevant, and far from being 'rubbish'.
Funded by the European Union, the Project which I co-ordinate, the PAS Project (Parents and Schools Projects), is taking place within 3 European countries, each research center looking to build strategies for parent/school partnership. Each of the three countries will be conducting case studies but not necessarily using the methodology to be described here. The UK arm of the Project is conducting research in and with 4 primary schools. We are currently coming to the end of the data collection phase.
Any rationale for taking a particular approach to research depends upon the purpose for which it is intended, the nature of the research, and its potential audience. The dissemination of research, similarly, needs to be effectively directed to ensure that the language of expression is appropriate.
And yet research seems to fall short on all of these counts. Academic journals tend not to be read in school staffrooms, and professional magazines do not find their way into University Departments of Education. Whereas it is expected that laboratory science can find ready dissemination through product design to delivery, social science, including education, generates skepticism as to both its usefulness and its influence upon change. This state of affairs has encouraged protectivism, territorialism, and a no-mans-land across which academic research and practice hardly ever meet.
This may be due to a number of reasons:

i)The mystification of practice. In order for practitioners to engage with the research enterprise, those undertaking research must ensure that it is clear, interesting, and in a language which can be disseminated to colleagues or participants without a glossary of terms or a higher degree in cultural theory. This has not always been so.

ii)The relevance of research. Whereas the natural sciences respond to the demands of industry, in particular research terms with an appropriate technology for production and dissemination, educational research does not always problematize educational issues in terms of practice, so that a research response might be implemented in the most immediate and critical way. This may fuel the claim made by teachers that research is 'out of touch'.

iii)The engagement of research with practical outcomes. Questionnaires and interview procedures which feed upon teacher, parent, child or other educational data do not always re-visit those respondents with viable feedback so that policy and practice become influenced. The engagement of teachers and others with research, therefore, often seems to have a conclusion such as a paper (often meaning certification for someone else) exercise.

iv)Teachers and schools have no receptive infrastructure with which to implement research findings. Although the literature on school effectiveness is growing, the call for change has become something of a mantra. Practical decision-making that incorporates theoretical and research positions does not always find application in the face of the current dilemmas of schooling.

v)Anti-naturalism. It is clear that any data generated will be pre-figured by research design and methods. However, it is critical that research reflects life as it is lived and that it should be an indicator of this. Translation of human action into statistical form renders it, at its minimal worst, meaningless, and at its best, merely indicative.

In summary of these general points about research, there has in the past been a tendency towards a dissonance which has allowed the participants in research to, as C Wright Mills puts it, 'talk past each other'. This conference and the research project which I co-ordinate focus upon talking to others and to each other in a meaningful way.
Generally, therefore, the varying interests, concerns and commitments of research and practice have opened up divisions between the two which discourage meaningful dialogue. These issues may be represented as such:

Issue Focus Issue

RESEARCHER Mystification of practice
Inappropriate language
Naturalism

RESEARCHER/ Awareness of problem relevance
SCHOOL Policy and practice orientation

SCHOOL School infrastructure

Educational research should shoulder the responsibility for building relevance and positive engagement into the research exercise itself. Only then will the process and the data generated be useful. Research, in order to do so, must begin with practice and focus upon its own contribution to practice. It is only through educational outcomes in practice that educational theory can be built, tested and implemented.
As can be seen, there are practical as well as theoretical difficulties in bridging the gaps between research and the school. My view is that research must look for alternative approaches so that the three constraints of language, relevance, and outcome are effectively countered.
In designing and carrying out research, it has been long considered 'scientific' to maintain objectively. However, such sentiments have led many a pilgrim into the desert of positivist science, having followed the paths of objectivity. Deserts can be very lonely places, not to mention disorienting ones. Even the judicious design of interview or questionnaire or the participation of the observer can, and does, lead to ethical as well as practical problems of 'distance' from the subject and therefore of mutual understanding. I do not need to rehearse the objections to positivism here. I would, however, re-iterate Bohm and Pleat's (1988) distinction between positivist 'endarkenment' and a type of research 'enlightenment' which is a reaction towards insightful change, is active, and contributes to relevance, implementation and understanding.
As post-positivist as questionnaires might be, and many have wanted to move from a positivist position towards the more interpretavist one of ethnography, life histories, case studies, etc., forms of data expression can still impose unintended 'preference' upon data by the choice of words, pre-classification of observables, post-interview classification, etc.
The PAS project (Parents and Schools), with its express intention of facilitating a school strategy for home (ie. school liaison), demanded a research design which was productive of outcomes and which hung a theoretical structure upon a practical purpose and consequence.
Having a design structure which begins with parents' and teachers' situational attitudes, the research process had to be amenable to, if not owned by, parents and teachers linguistically and in terms of social relevance.
The research project methodology was also designed so that a group of parents and teachers could make collective judgements and decisions about home/school partnership and which had real policy outcomes for the schools involved. It was felt that only at a point where interaction between the disparate groups was made possible would a working liaison between parents and teachers become empowering to both. The two groups were seen to be more than a collective of individuals and were set up within the research in an attempt to formalize what had become a 'naturalistic' collective of parents (at the school gate) and teachers (in the staff room). In this sense it capitalised upon an on-going process and attempted to bring together a collective community of interest. The design of the PAS Project was therefore at once facilitative of school decision-making and also transparent for academic research purposes, both practical and open to theoretical reflection.

The PAS Project

It has often been recorded in literature on home/school liaison from Douglas (1967) to Pamela Munn (1993) that parental interest in a child's education which extends to a commitment to partnership or involvement with school activities lends itself to enhanced child achievement, assurance, and contentment.
On the face of this, it would seem that more interaction between parents and teachers would be a desirable objective for both groups. To some extent this has indeed been seen in the United Kingdom, with real advances made with homework schemes, enhanced information systems to parents, parent governor training, and more parents acting as helpers in the classroom.

Je participe I participate
tu participes you participate
il participe he/she participates
nous participons we participate
vous participez you participate
ils profitent they profit

It is important, however, to make a critical evaluation of this position which counter-balances government propaganda or identifies only isolated instances of good partnership practice. Parental participation, constrained by centralized structures, can become an ideological initiative, intended only to support a 'mock' consumerism within education that reinforces a market view of social action and competition. In this way, participation does not necessarily enhance the child's learning (what about those parents who don't or who CAN'T participate?), nor does it develop the school as a community but implants a value system which is related more to the anti-collectivist view of business and finance. The French student poster from the 1960's illustrated this nicely:
So the suggestion that empowerment is representative of home/school links may be far from the truth. My own position is that the reality of mass parental liaison with schools is very different for three possible reasons:-

i)Difficulties of Parent Commitment. Research has suggested (Heywood-Everett 1995) that many parents, although anxious that their children should be happy at school, claim that they do not have the time to spend with teachers after school, in class during school,or at extensive training activities in order to become parent governors. Certainly commitments to employment and to domestic arrangements take precedence as the infrastructural pre-conditions for education and development. This might suggest, however, that at times of high unemployment parents might have more time to engage with schools. This does not appear to be the case (Heywood-Everett 1995) with professional parents (often both employed) being more ready to commit time to home/school links.

Other research (Pollard 1985, Kutnick 1988) has suggested that the very language and culture of school deters many parents. As part of a cultural capital thesis, language appropriate to engaging in educational discourse would cause dissonance amongst those parents feeling that they 'can't talk to teachers'.

ii)Difficulties of Teacher Sensitivity. The chorus of disapproval raised at the very term 'Mum's Army' of parental help in classrooms which was promoted by the British government in 1993, as well as the vociferous criticism of its motives, suggests that teaching staff in schools are not quite ready to lead parental consumerism into their very professional heartland. This is not surprising given the erosion (as teachers see it) of their professional status with the introduction of a National Curriculum, an imposition of pay review procedures, and more visible accountability and inspections systems.

iii)Confusion between consumerism and partnership. The position and role of parents vis-à-vis schools is changing. However, mixed messages about their new responsibilities as partners and their rights as consumers have inevitably led to a lack of clarity which is easily translated into either confused action or inertia.

In order to overcome such dilemmas and tensions, researchers such as Bastiani (1988, 1989) have attempted to develop school-based strategies which build home/school links from practice.

The PAS Project also focuses upon the immediate context and looks to teachers and parents of a school to develop their own strategy and thereby engage in an on-going process of liaison. In this, there will be a maximization of the organization's collective expertise as well as an enhancement of its problem-solving capacities. Given the tensions already existing in the area, such strategy-building needs to be sensitive and cognizant of participants wishes, interests, and fears. Enhanced communication, shared decision-making and networking within and without the school can only lead to effectiveness within a climate of continual enquiry.

It is with this in mind that the PAS Project has its objectives to:-

*To gain cross-cultural understanding about dynamics of parent/school partnerships in differing European countries

*To look at the differences between school priorities in developing a home/school partnership

*To identify the various priorities within schools (parents and teachers) in developing a home:school strategy

Taking four primary schools in the Preston area of Northern England; the UK part of the project looked to meet these objectives.

Home/School liaison as problem-solving.

Given the ideological pressures for more parental involvement with schools, the two groups of parents and teachers are confronted with problems as to its accommodation and the possibilities for parent and teacher resistance as outlined above.
It became clear at the outset of the research, that an approach which pre-specified conceptual understandings would encounter unease within either or both of the groups of parents and teachers. The purpose of the problem-solving approach within the PAS Project was to facilitate collaboration rather than to stoke up differences. In order to try to avoid such division, a research approach would only be appropriate if it engaged the two groups collaboratively, was unthreatening, was based upon naturally-occurring processes, and avoided the exclusive language of either group. In the PAS Project methodology, I believe that the first three of these have been met successfully, the fourth less so.
It was felt that a problem-solving 'game' might alleviate some of the intrusive aspects of positivist methodology in the project and also allow problem-solving to become a pivotal aspect of data generation. A 'game' played by the parent group, by the teacher group, and then together would facilitate a common language, trust, and comfort in decision-making in an environment which did not threaten inadequate (or none) responsiveness as might be the case with interviewing or questionnaires. The nature of the problem-solving game would have to be non-competitive and would have a natural usable outcome.
As parents and teachers participate in this 'game' they would be engaging in a practical reflection upon goals, assumptions, and projected outcomes. This has much in common with 'dialogic reflection' advocated by Smith and Hatton (1992).
One such game, suggested from in-service training sessions, met all of these criteria. It is the Priority Diamond exercise.

Priority Diamond Exercise

At the first stage of this activity, the parent group were given 16 cards, 12 of which had printed upon them a single issue concerned with home/school liaison such as homework schemes, parental education, involving more parents, discipline, and behavior. Four cards were left blank. The group had to order the cards into a diamond shape with rows of 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, and 1 with the top of the diamond as a high priority for discussion with teachers, the bottom as low priority.

[Insert diamond exercise here]

The 4 blank cards were 'open' to suggestions by the parent group as all possible priorities may not have been foreseen. The whole activity was audio-taped when the parents agreed to this and a record of the final priority diamond was noted.

The activity was then repeated on another day with the teacher group from the same school with the same cards. Again it was recorded and another set of priorities produced. They too had four blank cards.
The activities generated both quantitative (recorded, prioritized issues) and qualitative data ( the discussions during the activity), which served to represent negotiated and developing attitudes to home/school liaison. The methodological value of the exercise was that the researchers were only present to explain the procedures within the activity and to interpret the cards when necessary. They were thereby located outside of the research interaction, it being left to the subjects to develop their own themes and needs and in their own language. This latter aspect, of course, was particularly appropriate to the PAS Project as an important strand of investigation, which was to look at minority ethnic parents and their particular issues, dilemmas ,and interests in home/school liaison.
The final activity was, at a later date, to bring the two groups, parents and teachers, together, displaying the differences between their priority diamonds on a large desk and then opening the floor to the final task of COLLECTIVELY reducing 2 X 16 card diamonds to 1 X 9 card diamond of 1, 2, 3, 2, and 1, if possible! Again the dialogue was tape-recorded and any final consensus in a diamond shape noted as before.
It becomes a simple analytical process, at the conclusion of this final activity, to note in what way(s) the singular priorities of the parent or the teacher group are transformed when a collective dialogue was concluded. Such an activity enables the school to perceive, in real terms, its strategic priorities for developing links with parents. Acknowledging this was both exiting and relevant for all. The school was engaging in a dialogue with its parents over the activity, and the researchers had avoided much transmission of interference in the process.
The problem-solving approach as a research instrument had a number of distinct advantages for this project:-

i)It provided teachers and parents with a focus for dialogue with each other.

ii)It was naturalistic insofar as parents and teachers could hold open discussions around these issues. In this sense it had much in common with conversation.

iii)It articulated a problem which was current and common to both groups.

iv)In terms of outcomes, it produced a 'statement' of parent and teacher priorities and therefore could be a pro-active mechanism for change.

v) It was non-threatening.

vi)The priority 'statement' was non-verbal insofar as it was not in the form of a final report. This sustained the impression of informality and play and yet considered opinion. It could also be seen as an interim statement rather than a summation of policy.

In conclusion, the deliberate distancing of the research from the research in the Project attempts to constructively challenge the perspective on science which insists upon a Cartesian subject/object division. The methodology here, which utilizes problem-solving and focuses on actors freely generating their own data, provides a learning environment for those actors and, tangentially, for the researcher. In so doing, the approach minimizes the hegemony of a fixed evaluation stance and enlivens both the debate and the possible responses by breaking down obstructive dichotomies.
Theorists from both the past and the present might attach significance to this approach. John Dewey's perception of research subjects' 'social intelligence', their collective participation, and their problem-solving capacity become, for him, the foundations of an experiment in co-operation essential for the development and maintenance of democracy. The approach might also resonate with post-modern emphases on contingency, on local determinism as opposed to the absolutism of meta-narrative projects, and with a trust in 'the knowing subject' whose knowledge or data is always pre-interpreted through existing conceptual schemes.
Problem-solving within the PAS Project serves to raise the status of the main actors in the play and decrease the role (as it were) of the playwright. As such, it relies upon the improvisatory skills of the former and the facilitation and recording skills of the latter. As a generator of data it has strengths of relevance and reality for those involved, as a generator of theory it demands that data be brought together sensitively and with the involvement through feedback in the problem-solving dialogue of the central players - in this case the teachers and parents within the project schools. As a consequence, teachers and parents raise their central concerns (be they managerial, pastoral or curricular) within an arena of trust and collegiality. In this way participation may lead to partnership, and individualism lead to democracy.

References

Bastiani J (1988) Parents and Schools : bright ideas (London : Scholastic Publications Ltd)

Bastiani J (1989) Working with Parents : a whole school approach (Windsor: NFER-Nelson)

Bohm D and Pleat D F (1988) Science, Order and Creativity (London : Routledge)

Douglas J W B (1967) The Home and The School (London : Cassell)

Heywood-Everett G (1995) Synopsis of PAS (UK) Project (Address to Lancashire Education Authority)

Kutnick P (1988) Relationships in the Primary School Classroom (London: Paul Chapman)

Munn Pamela (1993) Parents and Schools (London : Routledge)

Pollard A (1985) The Social World of Primary School (London : Cassell)

Sanger J (1994) Seven Types of Creativity; Looking for insights in data analysis (BERJ VOL 20 No 2)

Smith D and Hatton N (1992) Towards Critical Reflection in Teacher Education (Paper to the annual conference of the Australian Teacher Education Association, Ballina, Australia)

Wolfenale S (1992) Empowering Parents and Teachers (London: Cassell)