Parent-teacher Interaction in Classroom Activities and Its Effect on Teachers' Professional Development

Abstract

  Many kinds of school participation practices have emerged in recent years in Japan. This paper focuses on classroom voluntary activities, a form of parental involvement practice, from the viewpoint of（1）their effect on teachers' professional development and (2) politics embedded in the volunteer-teacher interaction.

  This paper approaches the subject from three angles. First, volunteer-teacher interaction and its characteristics and structures are analyzed. Second, teacher interviews are analyzed to see how such input is perceived and employed for their own professional development. Finally, the conditions, or micro-politics, behind such relationships between laypersons and teachers, are analyzed.

  There were three main findings from the interview data, documents and fieldnotes: first, in volunteer-teacher communication, teachers and volunteers talked mostly about how children learn and why children can/cannot understand. This illustrates that the nature of the interaction is determined by the large amount of high quality information about the children. Second, teachers make use of the knowledge gained from such communication as a resource for their reflection after instructional practice and welcome volunteers' input. Third, the harmony of this relationship is, however, contingent. There is a politics driven by interests of the volunteers and teachers. Volunteers deliberately did not problematize teachers' instruction methods in order not to stir up antipathy. Also, teachers divided their professional knowledge into “periphery” and “center”, excluding parental intervention in the case of their central subject. Thus the impact of parental involvement on teachers' professional development is limited.