Chapter 5: Social Representations of Parental Engagement in Poverty-Related Contexts: Empty Parents and Full Teachers

From the 1990s onward (cf. Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler, 1995), researchers in the field of school–family–community partnership refer to many concepts—beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and so on—that pertain to representation. In particular, educators’ representations of the child and the parent are considered an important determinant of educators’—professionals acting in school and other communities’ organizations and performing an educational function—practices, actions, and their interactions with the parent. This is central to understanding the disagreement between educator (particularly the teacher) and parent. This is particularly for families in a poverty-related context, that is, when family members face the social problem of poverty and have to deal with the associated sociocultural and symbolic phenomena, such as the negative representations of educators toward ‘‘poor’’ parents and children. But the numerous models and typologies generally fail to grasp the process and dynamic underlying educators’ representations because these models and typologies tend to be associated with a cognitive-behaviorist and associationist logic (see Boulanger, 2016, 2019). It is no surprise, then, that these approaches can’t help improve the understanding of why educators represent the depth of parents’ environments in a very limited way—the distal level in Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) model—and, above all, the dynamic and contextual dimension of parental engagement that I define as the way, active or passive, that a parent relates with his or her environment and their movement from one systemic zone (cf. school, family, engagement in the classroom; Boulanger, 2019). What processes and mechanisms explain these limits in how educators represent parental engagement? Responding to this question could help researchers’ understanding of teacher–parent disagreement, particularly in poverty-related contexts.