CESNOVA

Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues, CIES, ISCTE.

In the last decades, parental participation and involvement  have been encouraged as a way to motivate a greater educational sucess for students (Coleman, 1990, Epstein, 2009). This belief installed in current society, along with the changes in school and in the ways of family formation, has been causing changes in interactions between teachers and student's families.

This project aims to study the family-school interface in three different stages. A comparative analysis of governmental encouragement policies to interaction between school and familiy will be done, in order to try to place Portugal about the ability expected form schools to integrate the parents of its students in its pedagogical and management activities. From this macro analysis, we move on to a meso analysis, during which we will try to understand how schools take national educational policies and how, along with them, build their strategy of moving closer to the families. In addition to the school's strategic view, and because of the great professional autonomy of the teacher, it is as well of the utmost importance to us the way by which teachers, more specifically the Class Director, apply the educational policies and their board's management guidelines with their student's families, trying to understand the reinterpretation that each actor does about how that interaction should be and the role each one has to play.

Supervision: José David Gomes Justino

Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology of Lisbon University Institute, and New University of Lisbon - Faculty of Social and Human Sciences

Doctoral Project with scolarship of FCT (SFRH/BD/80072/2011)