Cooperation Between School and Family

Introduction

There is overall consensus at the theory level, legislation level, in public and among professionals on the importance of cooperation between family and school. In the contrary to this consensus is the reality of educational practice in which genuine cooperation between the school and family is more a remarkable example or exception than a generally applied standard of practice. In the contemporary world, partnership is almost a ‘commonplace’ or even a fashionable (but sometimes empty) slogan in considering each social and thus educational practice as well. Review of literature shoves that this term is often defined differently and quite often it is not operationalized at all.

Dominant Models of Family-School Partnerships

Our analyse of family-school partnership issue included theoretical studies and researches on family-school relationships, programmes of parent involvement and evaluations of programmes, handbooks for practitioners, as well as legislative documents on cross-national level (Table 1).

Table 1. The study sample books articles synthesis websites

Studies 16 56

Researches 24 7

Programmes and programme evaluations 1 14 8

International policy reviews 3 3

Handbooks 17 2 8

Legislative documents 3 15

We identified two dominant approaches to partnership:

1) The first we called the initial-utilitarian approach based on the assumption that partnership generates from the existence of complementary interests and matching goals between school and family as the basis for sharing meaning out of which the process of joint activities comes from. By this approach, since the family and the programme have the overlapping spheres of interests and functions, and these are the child and his/her educati...

... middle of paper ...

...

Mendoza, J., Katz, L. Robertson, A.S. (2003). Connecting With Parents in the Early

Years. University of Illinois, Early Childhood and Parenting Collaborative Champaigu.

MacNaughton, G. and Hughes, P. (2003). Curriculum contexts: parents and communities. In MacNaughton, G. Shaping Early Childhood Learners, Curriculum and Contexts (pp. 255-281). Berkshire: Open University Press.

Pavlovic Breneselovic, D. (2012). Od prirodnih neprijatelja do partnera: sistemski pristup odnosu porodice i javnog vaspitanja. Beograd: Filozofski fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu.

Railsback, J. & Brewster, C. (2003). Building Trust With Schools and Diverse Families. Portland: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory

Sterling, S. (2003). Whole systems thinking as a basis for paradigm change in education: explorations in the context of sustainability, Doctoral these, University of Bath.