Revisiting parental engagement: Creating, crossing, and blurring the boundaries of the home-school language divide

Abstract

Persisting divides between ‘multilingual homes’ and ‘monolingual schools’ exist around the world, including Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. Applying the lens of space production, we explore how ‘parental engagement’ is established, and the role it plays in shaping language separation. Discourse analysis on interviews with 24 parents of multilingual children revealed parental engagement as striving for parental access to schools, facilitating the schooling, learning and wellbeing of the child, and curating cultural and linguistic diversity. Parental actions both bridged and distanced ‘schools’ and ‘homes’, marking these spaces as intertwined and/or separate based on parents’ motivations, reasons and opportunities to become engaged or not. However, the home-school language divide was upheld. Besides reflecting conformity with schooling and the language of schooling, parental rationalisations presented with a drive to preserve the family as independent from schools. These findings provide insights to revisiting theorisations of parental engagement, and its role in reconciling home- and school languages.