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- Convenors:
-
Gabriel Scheidecker
(Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology/ CRC 1171 Affective Societies)
Marjorie Murray (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Alice Sophie Sarcinelli (Université Paris Cité)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D215
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
This panel assembles papers on parenting interventions, i.e. institutionalized measures aiming at re-educating parents, specifically in transcultural, transnational or minoritarian settings. It focuses on the political and affective dynamics, patterns, and conflicts involved in these interventions.
Long Abstract:
In the last decades, governmental institutions and non-governmental organizations have intensified their attention to parents and families, aiming at supporting, educating, or re-educating them with regard to child-rearing. Such parenting interventions are particularly challenging if they are embedded in transcultural, transnational or minoritarian settings affected by migrations, displacement, conditions of structural violence and segregation. In such settings, they deal with diverging parenting models that cannot be easily ascribed to individual hardships or the lack of capacities. Notwithstanding such social and cultural diversity, pedagogies tend to be highly normative, geared towards determining best ways of child-rearing. Thus, interactions between educational institutions and parents with dissimilar pedagogic standards and understandings, are prone to misapprehensions, frictions and conflicts. Finally, such interactions have political implications that need to be addressed.
This panel assembles contributions on the flourishing but rarely studied field of parenting interventions, focusing both on the political and affective dynamics, patterns, and tensions that shape (and arise in) these interactions. Contributions may pertain to one of the three following settings:
a) Institutions such as kindergartens, schools or organizations of family assistance dealing with migrant families or national minorities, many times aligning parenting practices with their pedagogical standards.
b) Institutions or media programs aiming at "modernizing" the parenting practices, often by appropriating and propagating pedagogies from other, more industrialized countries.
c) Institutions, e.g. IGOs or NGOs that operate on an international level, pursuing an agenda of "improving" parenting around the world, often by fostering what is called "positive parenting".
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a public kindergarten in Vienna (Austria) this contribution explores how the programmatic ideal of "educational partnership" is translated into interactions between pedagogues and parents and becomes entangled with processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Paper long abstract:
While care for young children in Austria was formerly mostly relegated to the ‚private' domain, in recent years it is increasingly defined as a joint task of institutions and families. In this spirit, newly established guidelines for institutional child-care conceptualize the relationship between kindergarten and parents as 'educational partnership', suggesting reciprocity, shared interests, and equality.
Combining an analysis of educational policies with insights from ethnographic fieldwork in a public kindergarten in Vienna, this paper examines how the programmatic ideal of partnership is translated into pedagogues' interactions with a highly diverse clientele. As I argue, the concept of "educational partnership" is constructed as a facilitator of "respect" for "diverse family constellations and values", but at the same time relies on a narrow normative vision of the 'good' family. In practice this contradiction feeds into complex constructions of difference and belonging, as pedagogues smoothly realize the ideal of "good cooperation" in their interactions with middle-class parents, while their relationships with 'other' parents - often labeled as "the difficult parents" - oscillate between support and its withdrawal. The analyzed cases illustrate that both ethnic categorizations as well as implicit cultural and gendered norms of 'good' parenting play a key role in the enactment and suspension of 'partnerships' between pedagogues and parents. I also illustrate, that these processes have significant implications for children's experiences of inclusion and exclusion in kindergarten and, moreover, affect their future whereabouts and school placement.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on data of a multi-sited and child-centered ethnography of kindergarten children in Zurich, Switzerland, this contribution explores how ephemeral insights into children's transnational out-of-school live get processed in pedagogical practice.
Paper long abstract:
"Dear Parents, from here on we can do it alone" is written, printed out on a sheet, laminated and attached to a kindergarten fence in a highly diverse, economically deprived neighbourhood on the outskirts of Zurich, Switzerland. This should not only prevent parents from accompanying their offspring into the cloakroom and help, as argued in smaller print below, the children to get self-confident and independent. It is also a sign of demarcation and anticipates disagreement in the conception of child-rearing. This paper is based on an in-depth ethnography of a kindergarten class. It aims at discussing the schooling of migrant children when parents are kept at distance. I explore how putative bits and pieces of transnational family lives - ephemeral insights - nevertheless find their way through the fence and enter kindergarten, and thus get filtered, translated and recognized within everyday practice of the kindergarten teachers. Thereby I show how those insights are made relevant in the teaching of migrant children in a supposedly compensatory manner and how they both legitimize and constitute a practice of Doing Swiss and, at the same time, how they are reflected back into the families.
Paper short abstract:
In my paper, I explore different aspects of interactions between parents with different backgrounds living in Norway and public employees working with family assistance, focusing on public and institutional discourses as well as individual spaces for action.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper, I explore different aspects of interactions between parents with different backgrounds living in Norway and public employees working with family assistance. In my ongoing fieldwork, I am investigating what values about child-rearing employees at public institutions such as health centres communicate to parents with refugee/immigrant and Norwegian background, how parents communicate their ideals and what discoursive repertoires the involved actors use to engage with and negotiate differences and disagreements.
Furthermore, I discuss what role ideas of 'the other', both based on discourses and personal experience, play in these interactions,. Here, tensions such as public controversies around the Norwegian Child Protections Agency (barnevern) and a growing acceptance in public debate to view 'immigrants' as people who should 'adapt to Norwegian norms or leave' (cf. Gullestad, 2002: 30-31; 100-102) are important contextual factors. Two dimensions that I have so far discovered, are an idea of public employees as much appreciated helping experts, vs. an idea of them as interfering with the private sphere. The latter can more symbolically speaking also refer to discourses where the state is seen as imposing 'its' values on people. In this context of distrust, I explore trust-building as well as local and personal ideas of filling the role of public employee.
Reference:
Gullestad, M., 2002. Det norske sett med nye øyne. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores specific parenting intervention in well-established Tibetan diaspora. An agenda of universal respect in Tibetan schools in exile and resistance towards it reveal integration as an intra-societal phenomenon, resting on power relations, ideologies, infrastructure and lived history.
Paper long abstract:
This paper provides an ethnographic account and analysis of a specific parenting intervention that has in recent years been implemented by Tibetan diasporic schools in India. The agenda of universal respect propagating among parents, foster parents, teachers and students of Tibetan schools in exile - manifested through generalized use of honorific language, and resting on folk philosophical concepts of 'good' vs 'bad' behavior, conduct and the ways in which ethical conduct can be induced through speech and body practices - and the resistance expressed towards it by a portion of Tibetan exilic society reveal a complex set of power relations at play in a contemporary well-established diaspora. Its unique characteristics, i.e. geographical concentration and well-documented history of more than fifty years of exile, provide insight into the processes at play in mature diasporic groups, where disparate ethical considerations, previously dealt with within the private sphere through social commentary (e.g. jokes using ethnic differences in language use, politeness rules etc.), have shifted towards the public sphere of semi-official pedagogic intervention in Tibetan exilic boarding schools. This paper aims to shed new light on the conference theme aspects of new diaspora networks and 'integration' as a process directed not only outwards, towards the host society, but also inwards, as an intra-societal phenomenon, resting on power relations, ideologies, infrastructure and lived history.
Paper short abstract:
In recent years teaching personal and urban middle class in Taiwan adopted the Western practice of "praising" children. This, however, conflicts with the Tao's traditional culture in which "praising" is strongly frowned upon due to an egalitarian ethos and a local theory of emotional equilibrium.
Paper long abstract:
The Tao are a group of indigenouse Taiwanese people living on the offshore island of Lanyu. In traditional culture children are not "praised" (azwazwain) by their care-givers due to a strong egalitarian ethos and a local theory of emotional equilibrium. "Arrogant" (mazwey) behavior is strongly frowned upon as it disturbes the "respectful and polite ways" (macikakanig) between co-villagers as well as between people and spiritual beings. According to traditional belief the fate of a child that is "praised" will turn for the worse. In recent times local Chinese school teachers emphasized the importance of positive feedback to motivate Tao children for a better learning. They propagated "praising" as an educational method at parent-teacher meetings. In the contemporary Taiwanese school system there is a strong orientation towards Western - especially American - theories of learning. Even though "praising" has no tradition in Taiwan it is now widely used to enable "optimal" learning. One cultural force behind this is the Confucian focus on knowledge acquisition which is seen as a person's duty. The new pedagogical standards of urbanized middle class Taiwanese are strongly opposed to the norms and values of traditional Tao society as both educational systems differ in regard to positive and negative markings, the elicitation of affective arousal, and culturally specific ideas of attachment. For the Tao the situation is complicated: They want to keep their local traditions and at the same time enable their children to integrate into Taiwanese society to make a better living.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I locate the government-led experimental education scheme within the framework of Han-Chinese relations with indigenous peoples such as the Atayal in Taiwan and explore Atayal parental participation in the implementation of experimental education in an Atayal elementary school.
Paper long abstract:
The growth of experimental education implemented at primary level in Taiwan has recently been identified as a crucial step in the country's future multicultural development, particularly following the lifting of martial law in 1989 and the ensuing educational reform of the new period of political liberation. The growing body of literature on indigenous education has led to Taiwan becoming a reference point for global studies of indigenous education, and an influential role has been played by these studies through the development of empirical case-studies supporting the contemporary theorisation of experimental education. In this paper, I locate the government-led experimental education scheme within the framework of Han-Chinese relations with indigenous peoples such as the Atayal in Taiwan. I explore Atayal parental participation in the implementation of experimental education in P'uma elementary school, which serves an Atayal community located in a mountainous area of central Taiwan. Through an ethnographic description of the birth and development of experimental education in the wider contemporary context, I argue that Atayal parents construct 'Atayal education' as a moral category to problematise state-funded formal education and transform ethnicity-oriented reform into a moral project. I show that parental and community intervention creates certain innovative and pedagogical practices, which appear to appeal to a number of local Atayal, the school staff, teachers and students. I then advance to a more widely theoretical consideration by discussing how such state-supported schemes became a force enabling stakeholders to reflect on educational reform in the context of the education system in Taiwan.