Tracing My Research on Parent Engagement: Working to Interrupt the Story of School as Protectorate

Abstract

In this article, the author makes visible and works to interrupt the story of school as “protectorate.” In examining, within this dominant narrative, educators' taken-for-granted assumptions about parents' positioning in relation to the landscape of school, the author presents research on parent engagement that provides those within the field of education with a new plotline to replace the protectorate plotline. The author uses the term parent engagement consciously to differentiate it from such notions as parent involvement or parent partnerships that also populate the literature pertaining to educators' relationships with parents and family members of the children they school. In exploring taken-for-granted assumptions, the author defines what parent engagement is, analyzes how notions of parent engagement have been enlarged and expanded over the past decade and a half, and explores how a “curriculum of parents” in teacher education—at preservice, in-service, and graduate levels—could redefine what it means to be a professional by conceptualizing it as being in relationship with and working alongside parents and families.