The cultural and emotional politics of teacher–parent interactions

Teaching and Teacher Education 16 (2000) 843}860

The cultural and emotional politics of teacher}parent interactions Sue Lasky* Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, The International Centre for Educational Change, Department of Theory and Policy Studies, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6 Received 25 January 2000; received in revised form 26 May 2000; accepted 9 June 2000

Abstract This article seeks to explore the ways in which the culture and organization of teaching in#uences the experiences and emotions teachers report in their interactions with parents. Hargreaves' framework, based on the emotional politics of teaching, is used here to analyze "fty-three primary and secondary teachers' interview responses in which they described interactions with parents that elicited negative and positive emotions. Parent}teacher interactions are explored as emotional practices that are inseparable from teachers' moral purposes, shaped by in#uences of culture and relationship, and inextricably interconnected elements of status and power. Data suggest that the culture and organization of teaching in#uence the values, discourses and senses of purpose teachers hold and thus the experiences and emotions they report in their interactions with parents. The article closes with suggestions for further research and policy considerations.  2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Emotional politics; Teacher}parent interactions; Teachers' moral purposes

1. Introduction Those of us who have been teachers or parents of school-aged children know that interactions between parents and teachers can be emotionally loaded. As parents, we have discussed the frustration of being demeaned by teachers, or the relief and joy in knowing that a teacher is working to bring out the best in our child. As teachers, we have discussed the crazy parent who yells unreasonable demands, the uncaring parent who does not take time to provide a child breakfast before school, or * Tel.: #416-686-3909. E-mail address: [email protected] (S. Lasky).

the supportive parent who volunteers regularly in our classroom. In short, interaction between parents and teachers is one of the most common forms of social interchange for those who have children or teach them. Social interaction that draws individuals together is grounded in a world of emotionality (Denzin, 1984). Emotions are not solely internal personal phenomena. They are also social in nature. They exist between people as much as within them. Emotions are an important form of communication between individuals. They are also a referent point for self-understanding. They help us discern when we feel safe, threatened, satis"ed with a job well done, or frustrated because our purposes

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cannot be met. Exploring the emotions that are elicited during interactions between individuals can provide a window to help us understand the more subtle, often unspoken elements in human interaction. Emotions are central to human interchange, whether in the form of relationships that are more enduring in nature as with loved ones, or those that are brief, episodic interactions, e.g. the glance of a stranger that warms our heart, or makes us cringe. They are integral to social meaning, support, security and recognition (or the absence of these) in our relations with others. Emotions and emotionality are also embedded in relations of power and status, with positive emotions being associated with gains in power or status and negative emotions occurring from the opposite (Kemper, 1993). Emotions are much more than a set of technical or transferable &intellegences' (Goleman, 1995). They are deeply embedded psychological and biological phenomena that are inextricably interconnected with relationships, sense of purpose and power. Notions of power and status are inseparable from individuals' moral purposes which are developed through the cultures or communities into which people are socialized (Lasky, 1999). All these elements of purpose, power and relationship are interconnected (Hargreaves, 1998). They come into play in parent}teacher interactions. Our notions of school and appropriate relationships of closeness and distance between parents and teachers are shaped by deep-seated, enduring social, political and institutional beliefs and practices. These include: our own experiences of school (Hargreaves, in press); images of schooling popularized in the media (Dehli, 1995a); policies that rede"ne parents' roles in the schooling of their children (Whitty, Power, & Halpin, 1998; Crozier, 1998); notions of teacher professionalism that are built primarily on the idea of &teacher-as-expert' (Epstein, 1995); and the impact of cultural beliefs, socioeconomic status or immigrant status on parents' engagements in schools (Bourdieu, 1977; Ogbu, 1993). Many of these in#uences have created symbolic and actual separation between parents and teachers in relation to schooling. The school improvement and school e!ectiveness movements helped rede"ne how parents

could be involved in their children's schooling and how their interactions with teachers could be improved (Comer, 1996; Slavin et al., 1994; Sanders & Epstein, 1998). Important innovations in these areas included: developing parent-school partnerships (Epstein, 1995); creating a closer match between school and community &cultures' by bringing parents into the school and involving them in an array of activities (Delpit, 1995; Harrison, 1993) or utilizing parents' funds of knowledge to develop culturally sensitive curricula (Lipka, 1991; Moll & Greenberg, 1990); encouraging parents to be activists (Dehli & Januario, 1994) and fostering parent participation in school governance, as in school councils (Leithwood, 1998). Few empirical studies focus speci"cally on parent}teacher interactions (Walker & MacLure, 1999). Recent work in this area has examined communication between Latino descent parents and elementary teachers during parent}teacher conferences (Bernhard, 1999); and interactional dynamics during formal school events such as parents' nights, and parent}teacher conferences in secondary schools (Walker, 1998; Bastiani, 1989; Clark & Power, 1988). This work also analyzed teachers' perceptions of parents from di!erent socioeconomic classes (Crozier, 1997); and examined how cultural capital impacts parents' abilities to understand and integrate teachers' recommendations for participation in children's learning into family life (Lareau, 1987). Walker and MacLure (1999) found that teacher}parent communication during student conferences was bound by silent rules of discourse. They likened it to discourse between doctors and patients. The teacher was in control, choosing the topics of discussion, dominating the interaction and talking about students from their perspective. Bernhard (1999) found that a combination of fear and a cultural tendency to defer to the authority of teachers often prevented parents from asking clarifying questions. Phtiaka (1999) found that a single incident can create the conditions so that a parent is no longer willing to communicate with a teacher or school principal. Each of these pieces of work has identi"ed tangible barriers involving power that can block teacher}parent communication.

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Research that focuses explicitly on the emotional dynamics of teacher}parent interactions is even less prevalent (Hargreaves, 1998). This study investigates this important area of interaction by examining how power, culture and sense of purpose a!ect the positive and negative emotions teachers report experiencing as a result of their interactions with parents. It suggests that the culture and organization of teaching in#uence the values, discourses and senses of purpose teachers hold and thus the experiences and emotions they report in their interactions with parents.

2. Conceptual framework Although partly biological in nature, emotion is predominantly a social construction (Dewey, 1922; Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990; White, 1993). Repertoires of emotions are like languages. Although there is a common basis for language in all people, each culture has its own vocabulary, syntactic forms and meanings. Likewise, each culture and occupation has patterns of emotions and emotional display that are somewhat distinctive, that derive from societal practices, and that convey meanings and e!ects to members of that culture (Oatley, 1993). In short, emotion is embedded in socially established structures of meaning (White, 1993). Emotion is both a medium and a message of socialization. Individuals in all cultures appropriate guidelines or display rules according to cultural and ideological standards (Heise & O'Brien, 1993) for where, when and how to express particular emotions with di!erent people. For instance, professions such as nursing, teaching and #ight attendancy often emphasize the importance of caring or concern while remaining professional and in control (Chambliss, 1996; Hochschild, 1983; Nias, 1999). Elementary school teachers are often expected to be "rm, yet caring with children. At the same time they are expected to be acquiescing to principals, and emotionally detached, in control, or calm when interacting with parents (Waller, 1932; Grumet, 1988). Socialization into a culture or an occupation is embedded in human interactions that occur in an array of group or cultural contexts. Because indi-

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viduals tend to hold membership in many di!erent groups, there is no singular socializing in#uence. Each membership provides identity, motives, goals, roles and interaction partners (Kemper, 1993). While engaging in interaction, we learn how to interpret and express emotions through direct instruction, contingency learning, imitation, identi"cation with role models and communication of expectations. Individual and collective emotions thereby obtain cultural meaning because of their role in culturally available &scripts' for communicating and interacting. As such, emotions comprise one kind of interpretive scheme of a script-like or story-like sort, which gives shape and meaning to the human experience and the social self (Shweder, 1993). Just like cognitive intersubjectivity, emotional intersubjectivity involves the ability to hold shared meanings that are developed over time, through sustained interaction (Vygotsky, 1978), among two or more persons within a common "eld of experience (Denzin, 1984). This emotional intersubjectivity assumes shared histories, knowledge and takenfor-granted assumptions about the world (Denzin, 1984) for common meanings to develop. From this perspective, collective meanings must "rst be present before people can move to deeper levels of shared emotional experiences. Emotional understanding is an intersubjective process requiring one person to enter into the emotional experiential "eld of another and experience for him or herself the same or similar experiences felt by another (Denzin, 1984). Emotional intersubjectivity is the starting point. It is how shared understanding of particular emotional expressions and the meanings they hold occurs. Emotional understanding is deeper. It requires a shared understanding where one person actually feels what another person is experiencing. Teacher}parent relationships that are robust and multifaceted require commitments and conditions that can allow emotional understanding to occur between individuals. Yet, a great deal of the history, culture and organization of teaching makes achieving such understanding di$cult or impossible. This research seeks to explore the ways in which the culture and organization of teaching in#uence the experiences and emotions teachers report in

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Fig. 1. A cross-correlational model for emotional in#uences on parent}teacher interactions.

their interactions with parents. Hargreaves' (1998) framework, based on the emotional politics of teaching, is used here to analyze teachers' interview responses in which they described interactions with parents that elicited negative and positive emotions. Parent}teacher interactions are explored as emotional practices that are inseparable from teachers' moral purposes, are shaped by in#uences of culture and relationship, and inextricably interconnected with elements of status and power. As Fig. 1. indicates, each of these elements moves through and impacts the other. Teacher}parent interaction is at the center, as this is the focus of this analysis. The bi-directional arrows indicate that these outer elements shape and frame parent}teacher interaction, yet changes in interaction patterns can also reshape notions of culture, power and moral purpose. These are interconnected, inseparable elements of human interaction.

3. Methodology The data on which this article is based are drawn from a study of the emotions of teaching and educational change which comprised interviews from a range of elementary and secondary schools in the province of Ontario in Canada. Fifty-three primary and secondary teachers were interviewed from 15 schools of di!erent levels and sizes, and serving di!erent kinds of communities (i.e. urban, rural,

suburban). In each school, we asked principals to identify a sample of up to four teachers that included the oldest and youngest teachers in the school, was gender mixed, contained teachers with di!erent orientations to change, represented a range of subject specializations (within secondary schools), and included at least one teacher from an ethnocultural minority. All of the interviews were included in this analysis. The interviews lasted for 1 to 1 hours. A sub stantial part of the interview protocol drew on methodological procedures used by Hochschild (1983) in her key text on the sociology of emotion, The managed heart: the commercialization of human feeling, where interviewees are asked to re#ect on key events that left a particularly strong emotional impact. The entire protocol included 37 questions covering aspects of teachers' emotional relationships to their work, their professional development and educational change. Only the responses concerning parent}teacher contact were analyzed for this research. Teachers were asked to "rst describe an interaction with a parent that elicited a positive emotion, then were asked to describe an interaction with a parent that elicited a negative emotion. Responses were analyzed inductively. Teacher responses concerning teacher}parent relationships were extracted electronically, then marked, coded and grouped into themes, ensuring that all identi"ed pieces of data were accounted for and included in the framework. Reliability was checked by having two researchers independently code the data, using agreed upon themes and codes. Researchers then compared their analyses. While one-time interviews do have limitations as ways of getting people to access and disclose deep emotions, they do surface new topics and themes in previously unexplored areas, and they enable us to identify patterns and variations in teacher emotion across di!erent school contexts, with di!erent kinds of teachers.

4. Cultural and emotional politics As is the case with any social institution, the school develops and reproduces its own speci"c culture and sense of community. The traditions,

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customs, routines, and rituals which the school stimulates and strives to conserve, reproduce and condition the type of work life developed there. They also reinforce the validity of values, beliefs and expectations linked to the social life of the groups which constitute the school as an institution (Perez-Gomez, 1997). In these ways, teachers form a culture de"ned by their socialization into and identi"cation with a profession. Aspects of this include their formal education, continued professional development and beliefs and practices particular to the schools in which they teach. Just as other occupations whittle their followers to convenient size and season them to suit the occupation's taste, teaching also makes the teacher (Waller, 1932). Beliefs, routines and practices, the day to day ways of doing things, comprise the essence of culture. Yet, culture is more than a result of interactions and relationships per se. For institutions such as schools, the interactions and other elements that comprise culture are also embedded in relations of status and power: in the authority relationships of the classroom (Waller, 1932); between principals and teachers (Grumet, 1988); in the micropolitics of teachers' careers (Blase & Anderson, 1995); in patterns of surveillance between parents and teachers (Crozier, 1998); in the home knowledge sanctioned by the school that connects children and their family cultures, or disconnects them from the o$cial curriculum (Hargreaves, Earl, & Ryan, 1996); and in the ideologies of professional status and identity that teachers often use to distance themselves from parents (Hargreaves, in press). In short, culture and power are inseparable components of school life. Emotions and power, I have proposed, are similarly intertwined. Gains and losses in power and status act as strong sources of positive and negative emotion. For these reasons this analysis focuses on what I term the cultural and emotional politics of teacher}parent interactions. It examines two aspects of cultural and emotional politics in detail, relationship and power. 4.1. Relationship Public schools in North America have traditionally o!ered limited opportunities for teachers and

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parents to interact. What interactions there are tend to be largely school-based, e.g. volunteering, fundraising, or attending school events. Traditional or &classical' notions of professionalism (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996) have stressed that teachers should remain emotionally distant or &objective' while interacting with children and their parents. Since the late 1980s, the rhetoric of home}school partnership has become a key component of school e!ectiveness and school improvement research and advocacy (Vincent & Tomlinson, 1997). Partnership, however, is an amorphous term that does not always make explicit the unresolved terrain or the precise nature of teacher}parent relationships. One of the real tensions that many teachers experience is their sense that personal relationships with, and moral obligations to children and their parents are constantly overridden by an o$cial spirit of contractualism (Nias, 1999). The paradox is that teachers are expected to remain professionally distant on the one hand, while demonstrating emotional involvement through caring (Grumet, 1988). This paradox is also an element in other heavily &feminized' professions such as nursing (Chambliss, 1996). These data indicate that teachers and parents still tend to have relatively limited contact. All but one of the interactions teachers described took place at the school or through teacher communications to the home. Opportunities for teachers and parents to develop sustained relationships were sparse, although they did interact in more episodic ways: I don't have much to do with parents. It is unfortunate that one of the things that seems to happen in teaching is that the only time you ever see a mom or dad is when there's been a crisis. Four elementary teachers stated that they had steady or regular communication with parents either in the form of phone calls home, or through interactive homework assignment books. Many of the interactions occurred informally while parents were picking up their children, volunteering in classrooms, attending fund raising or sports events. Only one spoke of having conversations that extended beyond &work talk' with parents who

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volunteered in her class. Even she did not indicate that the interactions with her parent helpers extended beyond the walls of the school: I have thirteen volunteer moms. I have a parent in the classroom every single day of the week. I have two on Tuesday and two on Friday. So, they're in all the time2as they were volunteering, if the kids went out for recess, we'd get a co!ee and talk. It wasn't all professional dialogue. Interactions between teachers and parents at the secondary level occurred during formal school events or through pathways of correspondence sanctioned by the school. Parents and teachers communicated during parent nights, parent}teacher interviews, conferences and calls to students' homes because of discipline problems, such as lack of attendance, or problems of low academic achievement: The only interaction I've had with parents recently has been through Parents' Night. I haven't had a lot of recent contact with parents because I wasn't able to go to the last Parent Night2 . It's been a while since I have had a formal interview with a parent. I have talked a couple of times on the phone but not to any great extent. Only one teacher said that she lived in a small community where she knew the parents of her students on a personal basis: I do make contact with parents*not a lot2that is the advantage of living in a small community*because you know a lot of the parents. I think that is a real advantage. I don't see it as a disadvantage in any way. This teacher began her response by saying she could not think of any situations with parents that elicited negative emotions. She went on to discuss her interactions with di!erent parents because of

discipline problems she had with their children: I can think of one parent I phoned because her son*a grade nine student*is not motivated, is skipping classes, is coming late and is not showing any kind of responsibility at all. She was concerned about it too. She said she was concerned about it and she doesn't know what to do, and what could we do2(I feel) sadness I think as much as anything. A boy skipped class and his dad is a teacher here2 . I couldn't imagine that he would be skipping2 . There were four away from class. I thought, I'm going to check on those four2 one's a neighbor and I thought, I'm going to call his mom when I get home2the other one I knew wouldn't be skipping, wasn't. Before I could say anything to the fourth one in the group, his father walked in to ask a question. I said, `Paul, is Jess ill today?a Paul looked at me, and I knew the answer right away2 . I was kind of chuckling to myself. The father would be "rm, but he would be fair. I wasn't afraid for the child. Sometimes you do get afraid and you do hesitate to phone because you are afraid for the child. I knew it would be OK. It was kind of a funny situation. While this teacher did have to contact parents because students broke the rules, or were not motivated, she did this in a way that displayed and demonstrated empathy. She was able to experience sadness for the parent having a di$cult time. She did not shame nor demean the mother. She was able to appreciate the humor in the scenario of the boy getting caught for skipping class. She reported feeling safe talking with the dad, because he would be fair, unlike other parents who caused her to feel reticence about calling. In many ways her comments represent the potential for complexity, understanding and compassion that can develop when teachers and parents are engaged in a relationship, and not merely a string of episodic interactions. For the purposes of this analysis a distinction is made between interaction and relationship. Interaction is sporadic, episodic, &rule bound' (Walker

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& MacLure, 1999), formal or mechanistic communication. &Relationship' is a qualitatively di!erent kind of communication that involves more sustained contact, equality, #uidity, increased depth of shared meaning, values, goals and a$nity. Rules of discourse and social norms still apply to relationship, so it is the parity, #uidity, the ability to exchange roles and depth of shared meaning that are the key di!erentiating criteria. Shared understanding and meaning are developed through sustained contact in which individuals participate in conjoint (Dewey, 1938) or joint-productive (Vygotsky, 1962) activities. It is doing things together over time that creates the conditions for people to develop shared meaning, values and goals (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Cole, 1985; Rogo!, 1990). So, while it is true that parents and teachers do interact, it is rare that the conditions necessary for relationship to develop are present. When parents and teachers interact only sporadically, they cannot really develop trust, mutual respect, shared meaning or shared purposes. The conditions necessary for them to experience emotional understanding (Denzin, 1984) are thus not present. These conditions of limited interaction, located in the school and largely limited to school topics, can make it di$cult for parents and teachers to see each other outside of stereotypic, or projected images of &the other'. As Willard Waller observed long ago:

Much of social interaction rests upon stereotypes. The interactions of intimates largely escapes the in#uence of the stereotype, and so does namK ve experience for which no model exists in one's social world. But a very wide range of social interchange is a!ected by the presence of more or less de"nite stereotypes, sometimes stereotypes which have currency in an entire social group...and sometimes constructs of our own relating to particular persons or classes of persons. This is possible because in many kinds of relations we do not correspond to another person directly, but always to a more or less veracious construct of him in our minds (Waller, 1932).

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Such stereotypes or one-dimensional representations of others were evident in our data. All teachers reported experiencing positive emotions, such as happiness, satisfaction or feeling positive, in their interactions with parents when they believed parents were being responsible, when they supported and recognized teachers' e!orts or when they respected their professional judgment. Teachers consistently reported an increased willingness to work with parents when these conditions were present: I call home quite a bit and try to keep an open rapport with all of my students' parents, as much as possible2 . I've found that a lot of the time the parents are very supportive and I think that the positive experience comes from that. And again, it was really nice because the parent agreed with me. It wasn't, `how dare you speak about my child that waya. And she saw the same things that I saw2 . I was relieved to know that the parent agreed. And there was fear that the parent might not see this. By contrast, parents who did not follow institutional norms of appropriate parental behavior elicited anger, disgust, fear and frustration in teachers. Such parents questioned teachers' authority. They did not praise or recognize teachers for their e!orts. They did not treat their children in the right ways. All teachers reported feeling negative emotions when parents were viewed as uncaring or irresponsible; not supportive of teachers' e!orts; or not respectful of teachers' professional judgment. Such incidents left teachers feeling frustrated, helpless, demoralized or angry. They made teachers less willing to extend themselves to parents: I was angry and bitter2 . I have put so much, and boom, it doesn't matter how much I put into it, some parent is complaining, or someone says it's not good enough. Recently, meeting with a parent regarding her child, she was complaining to me about all the teachers in the past that should be "red. She was belittling my colleagues, saying that we don't

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understand her child. She was quite angry with the whole system and taking her six years of frustration out on me2 . I am trying to explain to her my professional obligation to inform her about problems that I am seeing her child is having; incomplete work, attitude, etc., etc. She proceeds to belittle all my colleagues and the system saying we weren't doing enough and we don't understand her child. That made me extremely angry. In summary, the consistency in the conditions that elicited negative and positive emotions in teachers indicate that teachers who did not develop relationships with parents tended to hold standardized, somewhat one dimensional, almost stereotypical views of them, where parents were judged according to norms of &good' and &bad' parenting. This brings us directly to the topic of power. 4.2. Power Professions such as teaching are a site of power, in terms of the ability or o$cial capacity people have to exercise control or authority over others. Three di!erent aspects of power dynamics between teachers and parents were present in the data. One was normative, involving processes of mutual surveillance and judgment between teachers and parents. Members of the teaching profession are socialized into its discourses and practices of hierarchical observation and normalizing judgment (Foucault, 1984). Such normalizing judgment classi"es people according to a range of &good' or &bad' behaviors, or standards of performance. A second power dynamic concerned teachers' moral purposes, the deeper motivations behind why they taught, and how they dealt with the threats and challenges which some parents posed to these purposes. The third, involved teachers' senses of professionalism, where teachers believed that they held power and authority over parents by virtue of their expert status and specialized training. 4.2.1. Normalization As moral agents, people experience their feelings at and to the core of who they are. Challenges to this inner, moral essence evoke a heightened

emotionality (Denzin, 1984). Our interview responses indicated that teachers also classi"ed and judged parents according to a range of what they regarded as &normality', which was largely an expression of their own moral purposes. Teachers distinguished between parents who were outstanding, negligent, &typical' or &involved'. Parents who complied most closely with institutional norms of appropriate parent behavior, who were involved and supportive, who praised and recognized teachers' work, who trusted teachers' judgment and who were responsible, elicited positive emotions like pride, happiness, and satisfaction. Parents who transgressed these norms, however, elicited opposite reactions: And I felt good that quite frequently the parents have asked me to be their teacher, asked the principal to put their child in my class. So, I've had those parents, and those parents have been in#uential on parent/teacher council, those kinds of things. And they're involved in their child's learning, and they're very supportive and positive with me. And that has been very rewarding2When I go out on the school yard on duty and a parent comes up and tells me how their child is having a wonderful time, and they're learning so much and they appreciate the communications I send home. Those things are great. It doesn't happen a lot because in this school, typically, parents aren't involved much. OK, spaghetti dinner, Friday night2I was really impressed. I had one parent who backed me all the way, `Anything I can do?a. And I just gave her a task and it was gone2 . And then of course there's just the plain old parent who says, `thank youa. Which they don't say often enough sometimes. But when it does, it's like, WOW. The reason why behavior is so poor is that I think their home lives are so bad. Children that we are meeting don't have a set of parents. They have one parent. They have a parent who works very hard to survive and there is very little time left over for emotionally feeding that child, providing time to listen to them, read with them, check homework and those kinds of activities

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that good parenting involves. Because of that these children are very apathetic about learning2(I feel) anger that the parent is avoiding being a good parent. Both elementary and secondary teachers in our sample expressed that the paramount purpose of teaching is the commitment and obligation to care for their students. Nias (1999) makes three generalizations concerning the caring purposes of teaching: E most teachers regard their relationships with their pupils as a personal rather than an impersonal bureaucratic one; E they derive from the interpersonal nature of this relationship a moral, as distinct from legal, sense of responsibility for and accountability to pupils and often their parents; E most teachers feel that their moral &answerability' to pupils puts on them an obligation to &care' for them. Others have focused on the idea of teaching as a caring profession (Noddings, 1992; Acker, 1992). Because they feel responsible for children, teachers believe they must act in their students' best interest. This obligation to care may be directed to children's physical, social, emotional, or moral welfare, to their learning or to all of these (Nias, 1999). Admirable though it seems as a moral purpose of teaching, the expression of caring in teaching is not always an altruistic or virtuous act. Teachers can care only on their terms, which can be inseparable from control (Hargreaves, 1994). Teachers, like nurses, may "nd themselves caring in bureaucratic and impersonal work environments which can make caring di$cult, contacts impersonal and clients unappreciative, so that caring turns into martyrdom, self-sacri"ce and bitterness (Grumet, 1988). And caring may also be expressed from a normative standpoint, the standpoint of the expert, of the middle class, or of the dominant culture. In the area of teacher}parent interactions, Dehli (1995b) cautions us to be critical of notions of &caring' and moral agency. She suggests that much school practice takes for granted that heterosexual, two-parent, middle-class nuclear family forms pro-

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vide the &best' environment for children. The work organization of the classroom and the school relies heavily on the supplementary work of middle-class mothers from nuclear, two-parent homes (Smith, 1989; Gri$th & Smith, 1986). Those who do not "t this model are often seen as lacking, inadequate or uncaring. Yet, notions of appropriate family forms, parenting styles, and proper ways to interact with schools vary according to ethnocultural identity (Delpit, 1995; Ogbu, 1993), social class (Vincent & Tomlinson, 1997; Lareau, 1987), and religious identity (Gibson, 1988). Parents whom teachers classify as not merely di!erent, but di$cult, as not normal and apparently uncaring, can provoke con#ict and negative emotion in teachers, to the point of incredulity, exasperation and even disgust. 2Some parents do not support their kids as much as they should. You know teenagers go through such terrible traumas2 . It hurts me sometimes because I'm a parent and I see sometimes parents are not as understanding of their children as they might be, or not as supportive and I get angry2that hurts me deeply. I had a little girl whose parents used I guess what is called tough love, you know. At the time she needed a lot of strong cuddles and understanding and no judgment2the parents' love is taken away and I don't understand that2 . When I feel disappointment it's because I love their child. I care about the child and I give the assistance, help trying to make them love their child2 . Without picking a particular parent, I think that this situation would be negative2when a student is not progressing in school because they are failing, they are chronically late, or they are just a behavioral problem. I "nd the most frustrating experience when you phone home and you can tell by the tone of the parent that they just don't care. They too have given up. If the parent has given up on their own child, its going to be very di$cult for a teacher to get across to a student2 . Clearly, teachers experience powerful negative emotions when their notions of caring are di!erent

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from parents, when they feel obligations &to make the parents love their child', but cannot grasp that the parents may simply love their child and express their parenting in a di!erent way. When purposes cannot be achieved, anxiety, anger, frustration, guilt and other negative emotions are the consequence (Oatley & Jenkins, 1996; Hargreaves, 1998). Teachers consistently reported feeling ine!ective, powerless and hopeless when they believed their e!orts to work e!ectively with students were impeded due to lack of support from parents: Well, the most recent would be this young man whose parents don't recognize him for the emotionally troubled young man that he is2 . Neither myself, or two guidance counselors are able to change the minds of these parents. (I feel) frustration. Like I said before, ine!ectiveness, frustration, why bother, you know. If I can't in#uence it, or they're not going to see it. They're going to be sorry in 10 years, and I can't do anything about it. Secondary teachers in particular reported feeling helpless and powerless when parents did not support them in developing a sense of personal responsibility in students: When I phone home and say, `So and so has missed now about twenty daysa. And they don't say anything2 . So after so many years, now I just say, I'm just informing you that there have been twenty absences, and there's no substitution for being out of the room2 . And there's nothing else we can do. The law ties our hands on it. If the parent allows the kid to stay home, there's nothing I can do about it. I get really angry, because I look at the kid and I think, if you worked for me, I'd have to let you go because you're not here enough to do the work2timing, attendance and accountability are really important2 . I "nd it so frustrating. You roll with the punches, and after a while you have to give up, because you can't "ght city hall. Helping students was central to teachers' moral purposes. There are, of course, times when parents are truly negligent or abusive. But many parents

who seem uncaring or unsupportive have values or practices di!erent from teachers. As teachers interact with an ever more diverse population, it is increasingly important that they develop the ability to discern when their cultural assumptions, moral purposes, values and ethics provoke negative feelings towards parents who do not behave in ways they believe are appropriate. The literature on emotions indicates that people experience happiness when their purposes are being ful"lled or when they experience feelings of achievement (Hargreaves, 1998; Oatley, 1991). Teachers in our study felt ful"lled and empowered when their moral purposes matched and were recognized by parents: The mother told me how I had encouraged this boy's self-esteem and self-con"dence and how she had seen growth in this child that she had never seen before. When a parent tells me that I have an impact in terms of self-esteem, selfrespect or self-con"dence that's when I feel that is why I am here and that I am making a di!erence in this child's life. I am proud that I do that kind of job. It makes me really proud to be in the profession and that I have that e!ect on a child. I always look forward to parents' night and that particular one, (a parent said) `it's your thoughts, your program, because there's so much that the students learn to do over the course of things that changes them and they change at home. They start picking up their clothes and so on, and even cooking mealsa. So a number of parents always remark how e!ective the change has been emotionally for these kids, not so much the academic stu!2it really helps us to know that we're doing the right things. Consistency in parents' and teachers' moral purposes invoked positive emotions. It created a sense of continuity, shared values and common goals, some of the very conditions that can lead to relationship. Alternately, when there was a lack of congruency, teachers felt their e!orts were being subverted. This created a sense of powerlessness and caused teachers to distance themselves from parents. While many teachers valued collaboration

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between home and school, these data suggest that they preferred this to occur in a unidirectional manner. By and large, teachers expected parents to conform to the institutional norms of appropriate parent behavior. This was particularly noticeable where issues of social class and marital status were concerned. Our "ndings are consistent with other work which indicates that working class and single-parent families can be marginalized in parent}teacher interactions (Lareau, 1987; Crozier, 1997). Often, what we "nd with kids who have severe behavioral problems is that these kids come out of one, single-parent households. This was with a mom. Her child was just a joy, lovely, lovely girl. She was the oldest of "ve kids. She was in grade four. She was given so many responsibilities at home that she seldom had a chance to do homework. And I kept on the mom, `she's got to get her homework donea2 . The mother would say, `But, she's got responsibilities at home. Don't you understand that? I'm a working mom. When I was her age, I had to look after the kids2a I understand that she must be busy. Five kids, she's busy. She wants this child to help out. And "ne, the child is willing to help out. And yet, the child is going to become a woman some day and she has to have an education. And why isn't the mom understanding this?2I was hurt because the mom didn't realize all that I was doing. But angry and upset at the fact that the mom didn't realize what a gem she had in this child. And this poor child is probably going to go on and not succeed. Not because she hasn't the chance. Not because she doesn't want to. But because the mom doesn't see her as being a real gem. I called up a parent2 . Split family. Father doesn't talk to the mother. Mother doesn't talk to the father. So, I was calling the father to o!er another interview to him individually and separately. And when I called2he started to ask me ridiculous questions and grill me over the phone about things that were just completely unreasonable and wouldn't take no for an answer2 . He

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was requesting curriculum documents, and, `How come you're not doing this?a and, `I want to know exactly what my child is doinga2and it was just crazy2 . You can't help but get angry and upset by it. You have to do what you can to remain calm and not get defensive and just do what you can to di!use the situation2and hopefully make the parent more aware. Educators frequently identify single-parent families as being linked to problems in the schooling of children, even when the prime problem is that of poverty, rather than single parenthood (Levin, 1994). Yet, the work that schools commonly require of mothers is particularly di$cult to perform under the conditions of sole-supporting mothering, especially in circumstances of poverty (Gri$th & Smith, 1986). It is therefore a concern that each parent's ability to participate in their children's education is too often evaluated by the same standards and ethical norms that are held for middle-class mothers in two-parent homes. This process of classi"cation and normalization in teacher}parent interaction is one that deserves more attention in contexts of di!erence and diversity, whether due to race, culture, class or family-type. 4.2.2. Surveillance In professions such as teaching, the power expressed and embedded in hierarchized forms of surveillance is fully integrated into institutional settings through human relations. Although surveillance rests on individuals, it operates in a network of relations from top to bottom, from bottom to top, and laterally. This network holds the whole together (Foucault, 1984). In our data, it is clear that teachers monitor parents to regulate student behavior: I had a run-in with a parent. This parent was crazy to put it mildly2this woman gave her daughter a note that she could leave school at any time. Or if she was late, it was because she wasn't feeling well2so the parent will lie for the kid2I don't have the nerve2to confront the parents about lying2but I have said to the parents, `Kate was in school. We were doing a test and Kate was out smoking a cigarette2 .

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I could see her. I have no recourse but to give her a zero on the test she skippeda. And the parent agreed with that, you know. But, it's just that, OK here's a problem. Let's get together and do something about it. Don't just write notes lying about it2it's really frustrating because this child2 is under sixteen, is not coming to class, so is failing. And I have to identify my failure rates2 . I'll have someone come to me and say, `Well, why do you have a failure rate of 25%? You must be doing something wronga. Whereas if the kid was in class, we could do it. She would get the marks. Parents, too, judge teachers according to normbased criteria of appropriate behavior. Teachers are under surveillance by parents and their supervisors: I did get ru%ed with parents saying, `I think you're a terrible teacher, the way you teach spellinga. She (the mother)2said, `Debbie's never had such a bad teachera2this is where I giggle, because she eventually did go to the o$ce and she said, `You know what, the only teacher that's worse than Mrs. Jackson, is Mrs. Rossa2 . I was hurt because the mom didn't realize what I was doing. Well, at the end of the year they (the parents) sent a letter to Robert (the principal) talking about the education Eric had, and how they were really pleased with it. And they liked how I had done this and that with him2and that was real positive. His mother wrote a note to the principal explaining how happy her son was to be in my geography class. That as a new teacher, the school was very fortunate to have a teacher with youth, exuberance and enthusiasm. That's been etched in my mind since then. And very positive. When parents report teacher behavior to school administrators, teachers can experience grati"cation or anguish. Teachers and parents judge each

other according to norm-based beliefs. They often rely on surveillance and the authority of principals to hold each other accountable. A key question becomes, `how can the conditions be created so that parents and teachers can move beyond mutual surveillance (Crozier, 1998) and normalizing judgment in their interactions?a 4.2.3. Professionalism One last theme was present in the data. This third aspect of power, also shaped through teachers' socialization into the culture of teaching, has to do with the authority and power teachers believe they hold over parents due to their professional status. The model of schooling which has been ascendant for approximately the last century is the conception of schooling as a professionaltechnical enterprise. It assumes: E that teachers and other school personnel are experts who know more about how to educate children than parents; E that educators embody a broader and more balanced view of a child's educational needs than do parents; E that in the parents' absence, they delegate responsibility for their children's education to the school and that educators should be empowered to ful"ll this responsibility with wide discretion and autonomy, based on professional expertise and judgment; and E that the school may delegate tasks to the parents, such as assisting in homework and requesting volunteers for the classroom, and that the home's sphere of in#uence is to carry out the goals and priorities set by school o$cials (Cibulka, 1994, p. 3). The notion of teacher professionalism is not a static or absolute term. It changes as external forces to the profession rede"ne and shape teachers' job expectations. It also changes as teachers themselves struggle to rede"ne their purposes and roles as teachers. Biemans, Sleegers, and DeJong (1998) and Van Veen, Sleegers, Bergen, and Klaassen (1999) have described teachers' extended, limited, progressive, traditional and indi!erent professional orientations. Hargreaves and Goodson (1996) also

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discuss classical, #exible, practical, complex and postmodern forms of professionalism. These categorizations of teacher professionalism are researcher-de"ned rather than teacher-de"ned, yet they begin to identify the range in typologies of &professionalism'. The work of Epstein (1995) and Comer (1996) also indicates that notions of teacher professionalism can be rede"ned to include a valuing of parent input and parent diversity. Our data support the notion that teachers' beliefs in &teacheras-expert' can create a perceived hierarchy of knowledge, value, and status that a!ects teachers' willingness to collaborate with parents as equals (Sanders & Epstein, 1998). It also indicates that some teachers are grappling with how to de"ne their professionalism di!erently in relation to parents. Teachers repeatedly reported feeling positive emotions when parents spoke with a tone of concern or respect and agreed with their professional judgment, as when teachers and parents worked together or agreed that the child &needs help'. When these conditions were present, teachers felt respected for their professionalism and believed they achieved their moral purposes of helping students.

I had a student who was very much an attention seeker and really di$cult to deal with. And the parent came in and we talked about it. And again it was really nice because the parent agreed with me. It wasn't how dare you speak about my child that way? And she saw the same things I saw2it was nice to see that the mother recognized what we recognized at the school2 . I was relieved and happy.

I found it very positive because the parents were very, they wanted to work with me. And it wasn't just, `What are you going to do for my child?a it was, What can we do, so it was very much working with them. I was very impressed2Well, I felt that the parent was sharing information with me in a scenario of trying to help the child2I thought the parent communicated with me in a tone of concern and respect, and, ah, partner-

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ship, that together we can work towards trying to construct some kind of bridge for this kid so that he's going to be able to be successful2I felt very positive about that interaction. Several teachers spoke of trying to bring around parents who initially disagreed with their decisions, using the power of their professional status and &reason' to engender parent trust. Here teachers spoke with the ultimate authority, the voice of reason. Parents listened. They were brought to understanding. There was no room for movement in terms of the decisions about curriculum or grade placement. When parents accepted the situations as they stood, and deferred to the teachers, granting them their trust, then positive feelings were evoked. These parents were thus not categorized as problems. I explained the philosophy and why we had chosen that particular curriculum. She was fabulous. She had been very aggressive initially and she understood. And then she said, `I trust this school and so that's "nea. And I like that word, when she said, `I trust this schoola, I thought well, we've obviously done some good things. She was able to approach me, which I think is very, very important. If you can do that you have no problems2that was very positive for me. One mother was really upset2on the verge of tears. She just said, `I think that my child is going to get lost in that classa2 . I gave her all the reasoning behind me putting him in that class. And she kind of said, `OK, yeah, OK. I'm sure that will be "nea. And I said, `But go ask. This is the time. If you're wondering about anything go in and ask hera. And she said, `No, I trust you. I'll just keep my eye out and see how it goesa. And I said, `really, that's all you can do. Just keep an eye out and see how it goesa. Other teachers felt that questioning of, or disagreement with their professional judgment undermined their authority. They clearly experienced anger and indignation when parents questioned their recommendations concerning discipline,

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academic achievement or the curriculum: Parents think they're experts in education and it amazes me2I had a student come back after I had marked their paper. There was a very nasty note, written by the parent, that it was the most outrageous marking they had ever seen, and what was my criteria, etc., etc.2I sent a message home through his kid. I said, `You can come and see me, no problem, but I'm much too busy to write a written reporta. I told him he wasn't quali"ed to comment on what I was doing2And I said, `What would you think if I presumed to walk into your o$ce, and tell you how to do your job2and yet, you think you can comment on my job. You're not quali"ed. Good, you're concerned about your kid, but don't think you're going to intimidate me into giving him more marks, because, you're nota2 . They have such naive expectations. For other teachers, parent disagreement or criticism was a source of genuine inner struggle, as they strove to construct their professionalism di!erently in relation to parents: I think sometimes when a parent calls and they're sort of being pointed in their criticism over the phone, you get very defensive and you feel like, hey wait a minute, you know. I've done this, this, this and this. And you know, don't tell me how to do my job. And you know, there's those kinds of feelings that come out. You feel annoyed that there is this person who keeps phoning and saying that you're not doing your job. And you sort of wish he'd go away. But you also feel a sense of responsibility, because when you step back from him and say, `well, maybe he's not handling this the best way he coulda, however, he does have a point in that we are supposed to do all that we can to turn a student round. To get this student to the point where he can sit through classes. And are there other things we could be doing? Maybe we haven't investigated all the resources or options. So yeah, there is a sense that I have to do more. And then you realize you have done everything you can. There's that feeling of, Uh Oh, a little bit of panic,

because there is nothing left. We've done everything we can. I've run out of options. What can I say to the person now? While this teacher acknowledged that he sometimes felt defensive when parents challenged him, he also expressed compassion. He stepped back and acknowledged that although the parent might not have communicated very e!ectively, he might have a valid point. There was frustration, but there was also empathy. His notion of professionalism included trying to understand the parent's perspective. Implicit in his notion of professionalism was a strong sense of caring. He was concerned with doing the best for the child, by not giving up. These data make evident that communication barriers can be created between parents and teachers when teachers hold a notion of &teacheras-expert'. Likewise, more #exible or open notions of teacher professionalism can facilitate communication and mutual understanding. The emotions teachers experience in their interactions with parents were also a!ected by their sense of professionalism. Teachers' moral purposes were sometimes inseparable from their notions of professionalism. These elements point to the need for teacher education, professional development and school leadership to foster more extended and #exible notions of professionalism before teacher}parent relationships can develop.

5. Conclusions The primary purpose of this article has been to explore how power, culture and sense of purpose impact the emotions teachers report experiencing in their interactions with parents. To achieve this goal, teacher interactions with parents were analyzed as emotional practices, inseparable from teachers' moral purposes. These were shaped by in#uences of culture and relationship, which were also inextricably interconnected with elements of status and power. These data show that the intellectual and emotional dimensions of teacher}parent interactions were intricately interwoven. The emotions teachers experienced in their interactions with parents were

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a meH lange of personal and cultural beliefs, largely shaped by the professional norm-based discourses and values they appropriate within the culture of teaching. Teachers were more comfortable with parents who "lled a related set of expectations and who shared their value systems. They felt demoralized, angry and discouraged with parents who did not ful"ll this set of expectations and values. Both teachers and parents sometimes felt confused, powerless and misunderstood as a result of their interactions. This article has drawn a key distinction between &Interaction' and &Relationship'. Many teachers in this study seemed to lack the working conditions which allowed or encouraged them to develop relationships with parents. This made emotional understanding virtually impossible, as sustained contact, depth of relationship and trust are critical to such a quest. Instead, teachers and parents interacted more episodically, or sporadically. They came together during parent nights, conferences, fund-raising events or during calls home concerning student achievement or behavior. The comments teachers made about parents, as a result of these interactions, indicated that they seemed to hold rather one-dimensional conceptions of parents. They had a tendency to &other' parents, to judge and classify them according to a range of normality. Teachers applied these norms to all parents regardless of socioeconomic and marital status. Single parents, for example, were often seen as not caring for their children. This judging and classifying of parents was closely tied to teachers' moral purposes and notions of caring. In particular, negative judgments and classi"cations of parents were often a result of teachers feeling that parents challenged their purposes and caring ideals by questioning their expertise, by failing to support their discipline practices, or by rearing children according to standards and values that di!ered from those of the school. Many teachers believe that to be an uncaring educator is a contradiction in terms (Nias, 1999; Best, 1995). Yet, the impossibility of teaching and caring for every individual in a large group leads many teachers to retain professional and personal distance from students and their parents so as not to become overly enmeshed in their lives. The phys-

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ical and emotional costs for teachers who become fully immersed in the emotional lives of students and their parents can be immense. How to care, balanced by distance, without othering or objectifying parents is a tangible tension that many teachers experience. As teachers serve an increasingly diverse population, it becomes vital that their preservice preparation, their continued professional development and their school leaders provide the necessary resources and support so that they can critically examine when and how their notions of caring and their moral purposes might damage their interactions with parents and create emotional con#ict within themselves. This research raises several issues and questions. The data for this paper come from teachers' descriptions of critical incidents. To develop more generalizable claims about the themes present in this analysis, we need more detailed ethnographic examinations of actual emotional encounters, across multiple contexts, of the emotional climate, cultural norms and notions of caring in elementary and secondary schools, focused on how these elements in#uence parent}teacher interaction. In general, we need more exploration of useful research methods for studying emotions in parent}teacher interaction, that will increase rigor, validity and reliability. The investigation of emotional understanding itself depends on emotional understanding in the research relationship. How to achieve this along with generalizable results across a larger sample is a great research challenge. Further, this paper examined teacher}parent interactions from teachers' perspectives. What do parent}teacher interactions look like from parents' perspectives, according to parents' social class, level of education, ethnicity and immigrant status? Would we "nd symmetry between teachers' and parents' perspectives, or di!erences between them? What forms of interaction or relationship do parents want with teachers? Lastly, an extensive body of research indicates that many aspects of schools can be redesigned so as to be more inclusive of parent participation. School cultures can be changed. Power can be shared (Comer, 1996; Epstein, Coates, Salinas, Sanders, & Simon, 1997; Delpit, 1995). However, parent involvement research often focuses on how

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to achieve increased parent involvement as a single reform. E!orts at strengthening parent}teacher partnerships, however, are all too clearly undermined by today's sweeping reform agendas whose other emphases and cumulative e!ects often eat away at the very core of partnership possibilities. In that respect, an important policy implication of the research reported here is to look not only at the elements needed for more successful parent}teacher partnerships, but also at how other reforms individually and together, threaten the possibilities for partnership by undermining teachers' sense of professional con"dence and security, and by overloading them with other reform obligations. How can informal avenues for teacher}parent contact be created and sustained during times of sweeping reforms, that make teachers feel overextended, overwhelmed and deprofessionalized (Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996), or vulnerable to parental criticism (Apple, 1982) and pervasive &disclosures of derision' (Ball, 1990), that repeatedly shame them for their alleged incompetence. Exploring the answers to these and other questions concerning the relationships between multidimensional school reform, the development of parent}teacher relationship and the emotions inherent in these processes, is our next challenge. References Abu-Lughod, L., & Lutz, C. (1990). Introduction: Emotion, discourse and the politics of everyday life. In C. Lutz, & L. Abu-Lughod (Eds.), Language and the politics of emotion (pp. 1}27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Acker, S. (1992). Creating careers: Women teachers at work. Curriculum Inquiry, 22(2), 141}163. Apple, M. (1982). Education and power. Boston: Routledge and Kegen Paul. Ball, S. (1990). Politics and policy making in education explorations in policy sociology. New York: Routledge. Bastiani, J. (1989). Working with parents: A whole school approach. Windsor: NFER-Nelson. Bernhard, J. (1999). What is my child learning at elementary school? Culturally contested issues between teachers and Latin American families. Paper submitted to the Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, March, 29, 1999. Best, R. (1995). The caring teacher in the junior school. London: Roehampton Institute. Biemans, H., Sleegers, P., & DeJong, F. (1998). Teachers' professional orientation and their concerns. Teacher Development, 2(3), 465}477.

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