La mise en œuvre de la collaboration école-familles : de l’interprétation des prescriptions institutionnelles à leur réappropriation par les enseignant-es

Abstract

Faced with the growing challenges of schooling, school-family collaboration is an essential means of combating school failure and inequality in Geneva's primary education system. The aim of this article is to gain a better understanding of how teachers interpret and reappropriate the injunction to collaborate in the day-to-day practices of their profession. The aim is also to identify the collaborative strategies and practices implemented by teachers according to their interpretation of this injunction. The corpus on which the results are based is made up of in situ observations of meetings between teachers and parents, semi-structured interviews with teachers, and institutional documents framing school-family collaboration. Analysis of the data reveals that the definition of school-family collaboration remains vague and implicit, leaving it open to interpretation by teachers. As a result, they implement collaborative strategies and practices to ensure that collaboration with parents meets their needs and enables them to overcome the difficulties they encounter. Ultimately, the study shows that this is an asymmetrical collaboration, in which inequalities in parental participation play a part and can exacerbate social and educational inequalities.