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Ethnography and Education

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Just how involved is ‘involved’? Re-

thinking parental involvement through
exploring teachers’ perceptions of
immigrant families’ school involvement
in Cyprus
a
Eleni Theodorou
a
Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy, Curry School
of Education , University of Virginia , Charlottesville, Virginia,
USA
Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Eleni Theodorou (2008) Just how involved is ‘involved’? Re-thinking parental
involvement through exploring teachers’ perceptions of immigrant families’ school involvement in
Cyprus, Ethnography and Education, 3:3, 253-269, DOI: 10.1080/17457820802305493

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 Ethnography and Education
Vol. 3, No. 3, September 2008, 253
269

Just how involved is ‘involved’? Re-thinking parental involvement through

exploring teachers’ perceptions of immigrant families’ school involvement
in Cyprus
Eleni Theodorou*

Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, Virginia, USA
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Parental involvement has been increasingly gaining support among education theorists
and policymakers across many countries (Kelley-Laine 1998) as an effective way to
improve student academic performance. However, the cultural assumptions underlying
calls for parental involvement have received little attention (De Carvalho 2001; Lareau
1987). Drawing on ethnographic data, this paper attempts to explore the culturally
specific nature of current practices and ideologies of parental involvement in Cyprus and
their effect on the marginalisation of potentially socially vulnerable groups. This
endeavour is undertaken through the examination of elementary school teachers’
perceptions of the involvement of immigrant parents in their children’s education. In
adhering to narrowly conceptualised notions of parental involvement and subsequently
perceiving the immigrant parents as ‘disinterested’, teachers at a Cypriot public
elementary school perpetuated and furthered the social marginalisation of immigrant
families.
Keywords: parent involvement; ethnography; immigrant; Cyprus

Introduction
Increasingly, parental involvement has been promoted as a method to enhance student
achievement (Berger 1991). Models of home
school partnership distinguishing between
and within levels of parental involvement and participation (see Sheldon and Epstein 2002)
implicitly hierarchise ways of involvement by taking for granted, and therefore minimising
some avenues (i.e. transportation arrangements to school) while promoting ‘higher’ and
more desirable ones (i.e. volunteer work), more common among middle- or upper middle-
class families. As a result, the cultural assumptions underlying demands for parent
involvement, the advantage they provide to particular social groups, and the high demands
they place on potentially socially vulnerable groups, such as immigrants and minorities,
have been left rather unexplored (see De Carvalho 2001).
Drawing on ethnographic data collected for a larger project investigating identity
negotiation among immigrant children in Cyprus, this discussion is an attempt to critically
examine (Greek) Cypriot teachers’ perceptions of immigrant parents’ involvement in their
children’s education and explore the effects these perceptions have on the social and
educational marginalisation of immigrant families in Cyprus. The findings of this effort

*Email: et4f@virginia.edu
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American
Educational Studies Association, Cleveland, Ohio.

ISSN 1745-7823 print/ISSN 1745-7831 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17457820802305493
http://www.informaworld.com
 254 E. Theodorou

show that most teachers’ perceptions of immigrant parental involvement were influenced
by a deficit perspective of immigrant families grounded in limited familiarity and
communication with the families and intimately linked to narrow conceptualisations of
parental involvement as on-site presence at the school.

Re-thinking parental involvement

Parent academic involvement, commonly defined as ‘parents’ work with schools and with
their children to benefit the children’s educational outcomes and future success’ (Hill et al.
2004, 1491), is typically measured in the literature as:
participating in parent
teacher conferences, and/or interactions, participating in school
activities, and/or functions, engaging in activities at home including but not limited to
homework, engaging in students’ extracurricular activities, assisting in the selection of
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student’s courses, keeping abreast of student’s academic progress, reaction to student’s

academic grades, imparting parental values (attitudes about the importance of effort and
academic success), or the level of parental control and/or autonomy support offered in the
home environment. (Gonzalez-DeHass, Willems, and Doan Holbein 2005, 108)

Parental involvement and parental participation are not synonymous terms, even
though they will be used as such for the purposes of this discussion. The nature of the
former is decided by school personnel and is usually oriented towards the more
individualistic goal of benefiting a parent’s child through, for example, volunteer work
or attendance at school events. Participation, on the other hand, refers to a more
collectivist power-sharing approach to home
school relationship which seeks to contribute
to the well-being of the entire school and student body under clearly defined guidelines so
as to allow full parental participation in the decision-making process (Symeou 2001).
Despite parental involvement’s popularity among policymakers, educators, and
education theorists, less attention has been paid to the implications it holds for
underserved groups (De Carvalho 2001). Critics of parental involvement caution against
its extensive implementation pointing to its culturally specific nature which hinders
participation for potentially less powerful groups such as immigrants and minorities
(Marschall 2006) as well as to the inconsistent empirical evidence regarding its effects on
student achievement (Drummond and Stipek 2004).
Marschall (2006) reports that parental participation in the USA (in the sense discussed
above) has been found to be lower for minority parents than for White parents and to be
related to parents’ income and educational level, even though it may have different effects
across the categories of ethnicity and socioeconomic background (SES) (Hill et al. 2004).
Recent studies nevertheless show that high parental aspirations, regardless of ethnicity
(Aldous 2006; Yan and Lin 2005), and social background (Aldous 2006), have a positive
effect on adolescent students’ educational achievements in reading (Aldous 2006), and in
math (Aldous 2006; Yan and Lin 2005), which in turn suggests that the popular push for
parental involvement practices that involve homework assistance or on-site presence at the
school may not, in fact, be the only possible or effective route for parents to support their
children’s education (Gonzalez-DeHass, Willems, and Doan Holbein 2005).
Notions of greater parent involvement and greater collaboration between families and
schools rarely consider that parents are not uniformly able to collaborate with school
agents across ethnic and SES backgrounds (Wasonga, Christman, and Kilmer 2003).
Higher-SES parents are more likely to see themselves as both able and entitled to be
collaborators of their children’s teachers whereas lower-SES parents are more likely to
 Ethnography and Education 255

encounter socioeconomic difficulties in participating, such as transportation and childcare

arrangement challenges (Hill et al. 2004), and lack of cultural knowledge about school
rules and conventional avenues of school participation (Delgado-Gaitan 1991).
Furthermore, studies have shown that parents and teachers may mean different things
when they speak of ‘support’ and ‘help’ for students (Plevyak 2003). A common myth
describes Latino parents as ‘uninvolved’ in their children’s education, yet Mexican-
American parents in Delgado-Gaitan’s (1992) study placed a high cultural value on
education, expecting their children to do well at school and providing them with the
necessary emotional and physical support to do so, even though they could not be of much
help when it came to homework due to their limited English language skills or lack of
higher formal education. Because of similar feelings of inadequacy, working-class parents
may believe they are being supportive of their children’s education by turning over
responsibility for it to the teachers (Lareau 1987; Lareau and Shumar 1996), whose
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demands, however, in turn determine the (desirable) extent and nature of parents’
involvement in their children’s education. And even though they may perceive their calls
for parental involvement to be neutral and helpful in increasing student achievement, in
reality teachers endorse behaviours from specific socioemotional styles (Lareau and
Horvat 1999), and, in doing so, provide an advantage to those students whose family’s
sociocultural resources facilitate their compliance with school demands (Lareau and
Shumar 1996).
A part of those resources are social networks which, contrary to the deceptively
individualistic inference of ‘parental involvement’ as being the work of the insulated
parental unit of the family, research has proven them to be particularly influential as
groups of parents approach school communities with different levels of access to networks
associated with the school (Delgado-Gaitan 1992). Middle-class mothers usually belong to
dense social networks which connect them with other mothers in the school community,
provide them with extensive information about the school, and are more likely to include
professionals who can be mobilised in negotiations with the school. In contrast, working-
class and lower-class mothers organise their networks predominantly along kinship ties,
receive information about the school primarily from their children (Lareau and Shumar
1996), and have access to resources which are less valued by the school (i.e. grandparent
wisdom vs. professional assistance) and thus are less powerful in disputing its authority
(Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003). Different networks are also acted upon differently
by parents in their dealings with the school. Middle-class parents often mobilise other
parents in their network to bring about change as a group whereas working-class parents
with no parent network to mobilise usually confront school agents as individuals and as
such are less effective in attaining their goals (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003).
Nonetheless, resources, or the lack thereof, to participate need to be seen as embedded
within larger sociocultural and geographic landscapes of capital1 and context. We need,
therefore, to bear in mind that the efficacy of parental networks and involvement does not
operate independently from other forms of capital which, combined, may be used in
negotiations with institutional agents (Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003); as well as that
barriers to parental involvement cannot be examined in separation from the local context
which determines their importance. This is why schools need to be aware of what hampers
(and how it hampers) involvement among their own families (Drummond and Stipek
2004).
Social capital notwithstanding, parental involvement is also tied to differences between
parents’ and teachers’ access to power (Fine 1993; Kroeger 2005). In view of the school’s
 256 E. Theodorou

structural power to critique and report to state authorities their parenting skills, both
working-class and middle-class (albeit to a lesser degree) parents have expressed the fear
that inadequate satisfaction of the school’s standards (e.g. compulsory school attendance,
hygiene and discipline) may result in deprivation of their custodial rights (Lareau and
Shumar 1996). This fear in and of itself stems from and perpetuates a power imbalance and
structural inequality between the school and the home which become exacerbated in the
case of immigrant and/or undocumented parents and which teachers need to consider in
their dealings with the home. Moreover, the overall approach to parent involvement has
been primarily adult-centric and it has rarely, if ever, included the child’s perspective. Such
an examination would also entail a careful assessment of the impact of parental
participation on parent
child relationships (De Carvalho 2001) which may be negatively
affected by the tension often created at home by homework assignments, and by the blow
parents’ dignity and authority might suffer when their limited educational skills are
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revealed (Lareau and Shumar 1996).

Methodology
The study is situated in Cyprus, a member-state of the European Union whose recent
history as a host country of permanent immigrants mainly from the former Soviet Union
countries began in the mid- to late-1990s (see Papapavlou 1999). The largest group of
permanent immigrants, and the focus group of this study, are Greek Pontians who are a
group of Greek ethnic descent that has historically developed culturally and geographically
independently from the Greek mainland to which the most recent wave of repatriation
occurred after the collapse of Soviet Union regime (Vergeti [1994] 2000; for more
information on Pontians see Diamanti-Karanou 2003; Samouilides 2002; Sophianides and
Redko 2005). Most of the families who find their way to Cyprus do so through Greece
after having acquired Greek citizenship and thus an EU citizen status (Papadakis 2004).
By and large, the immigrant populations’ arrival found the Cypriot society, including
the educational system, unprepared (Angelides and Stylianou 2001). In an effort to
integrate these culturally different groups into the educational system, the Ministry of
Education and Culture (MOEC) established a multicultural education policy primarily
consisting of mainstream education and remedial teaching in Greek (MOEC 2005a) which
is the formal language of instruction. These practices, however, appear to have thus far
provided inadequate support in Greek and other subjects to immigrant students enrolled in
public schools (Angelides and Stylianou 2003). The 2005 annual report of the Ministry of
Education and Culture (MOEC) notes that over the past years the number of pupils not
speaking Greek as their native language and enrolled in public primary schools has grown
reaching the percentage of about 6.1%. The vast majority of the immigrant parents learn to
speak Greek upon their arrival in Greece and Cyprus, usually through the educational
experience of their children.

Methods and participants

The discussion that follows draws on ethnographic data (see Agar 1980; Hammersley and
Atkinson 1995) collected for my dissertation research on immigrant children’s identity in
Cyprus from January until August 2007. For this particular portion of the study, data is
used from observations, formal interviews, informal conversations with participants, and
analysis of policy documents published by the Ministry. Specifically, I conducted daily full-
 Ethnography and Education 257

day observations (six hours per day) at an urban, public primary school in Cyprus from the
beginning of January until the end of June 2007 which marked the end of the school year. I
also conducted observations of events organised at the school after school hours such as
football games, school festivals, and graduation ceremonies, as well as observations of
visits to the homes of 10 immigrant low-income families. The children in one of the
families were not enrolled in ‘Mesogeios Elementary’. All other nine families had children
attending the school. I visited all families at least once for an average of two hours for the
purposes of a formal interview with the children and/or their parents. For half of the
families with whom I had established a closer relationship, my visits were recurrent
throughout the eight months of fieldwork and were social and casual in nature.
In addition to observations, I had numerous informal conversations with all the
teaching and non-teaching staff at the school, formal interviews with three immigrant
mothers and extensive informal conversations with an additional three whom I visited
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regularly in their homes. The teachers’ interview sample, a total of 10, included all the full-
time teachers at the school who had the responsibility of a class across all grades (1
6), the
principal, and the inspector of the school who visited the school intermittently. All of the
teachers, except the inspector, were female with anywhere between 6 and 37 years of service
and a combined average of 4.66 years of experience working with bilingual students.
Because of the small size of the teachers’ sample and the particular demographics of the
research site, years of experience as well as other identifying markers, such as grades and
classes taught, will not be provided so as to protect the anonymity of the participants. For
the same reason, all names of sites and participants used in this discussion are
pseudonyms. All participants who were formally interviewed provided their consent and
met with the principal investigator at a place and time of mutual convenience such as their
homes or the school. The interviews were semi-structured in style, lasted for an average of
an hour, were tape-recorded and later transcribed. Drawing on grounded theory
techniques (Strauss and Corbin 1994), analysis was done with the help of a qualitative
analysis software through the stages of open, axial, and selective coding (Huberman and
Miles 1994), employing themes and codes, both preconceived as well as grounded in the
data (Marshall and Rossman 1999), which were constantly compared to each other in
search of disconfirming evidence (Strauss and Corbin 1994).

The site
Parental involvement in Cyprus
Cyprus has a tradition of low parental involvement (Georgiou 1996; Symeou 2001), even
though there appears to be a general push in recent discourse for its increase. The MOEC
endorses home
school partnership as part of its official policy with regard to home
school
relations and it promotes it by emphasising the importance of home
school cooperation in
the various circulars it sends to the schools throughout the year. Through the circulars the
Ministry provides teachers with guidelines concerning the matter of home
school
partnership, praises its importance for the successful outcomes of a school unit, and
encourages the school to involve parents in its activities wherever possible as well as to
maintain continuous communication with the home (MOEC 2005b).
Generally, communication between the school and the home primarily aims at
demonstrating the school’s work and at providing the home with information about the
child, on how the school functions, and on how parents can assist with their child’s
 258 E. Theodorou

homework (Symeou 2001, 2002). Schools with a higher educational level among the
parents could be an exception to that rule, however, as the latter may push for more
involvement (Symeou 2002). All in all, nonetheless, principals in Cypriot elementary
schools adopt strategies of parental outreach that confine their communication to
information dissemination concerning school-appropriate behaviour and values, and avoid
practices that involve parental presence at the school (Symeou 2002).
Information about the child is usually given through parent
teacher briefings which
hold a long tradition within the Cypriot educational system. These take place at the school
during a set time period (40 minutes) which the teacher allocates from the beginning of the
year on a weekly basis. The briefings are usually parents’ opportunities to receive
information on their children’s achievement, behaviour, and homework activities and their
contribution to the discussion is typically limited to responding or supplementing teacher’s
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talk when prompted to do so (Symeou 2003). Despite the pedagogical value placed on
parent
teacher briefings, research has shown that the effective use of the information
provided by the teacher during these meetings depends more on the parent’s educational
background and attitudes, thus making it easy for families with similar educational
resources to those of the school to more effectively support their children academically. In
effect, Symeou (2003, 13) concludes, parent
teacher briefings ‘ . . . might not succeed in
fulfilling their purpose of enhancing children’s school performance for all pupils and that
they might even consolidate or widen existing stratification among pupils of certain family
environments’ (emphasis in the original).
Finally, it is often the case that teachers of lower grades are in closer contact with the
parents than their colleagues teaching in higher grades. The same goes for parents who are
members of the school’s Parent Association (PA) and who are more likely to be members
of the middle class (Georgiou 1996); have closer contact with the school and their child’s
teacher; participate more in in-school activities, some of which may require their voluntary
labour; and generally have more power at the school (Symeou 2001). Even though research
on parental involvement in Cyprus is still at a very initial stage, these findings reveal a
pattern of uneven privilege distribution based on parental involvement and as such are
worthy of attention for the implications they hold for lower-income families in general and
for the immigrant populations in particular.

Mesogeios Elementary
The major site of the study is a small urban public primary school in Cyprus, heretofore
called ‘Mesogeios Elementary’, which has fewer than 150 students and a high concentra-
tion of non-Cypriot students (about 30%). It is located in the heart of the city surrounded
by old and formerly thriving business establishments and poorly preserved buildings
populated by immigrant families who prefer them because of the affordable rent. The
school is under the jurisdiction of the MOEC of Cyprus which, due to the nature of the
centralised educational system, is responsible for providing schools with equipment,
personnel, and textbooks of the national curriculum (MOEC 2005a). In that sense,
Mesogeios Elementary can be considered typical in the curriculum it pursues, the funding
it receives, and its organisational structure.
 Ethnography and Education 259

Findings
Found lacking: teacher perceptions of parent disinterest and disinvolvement
Interestingly, most of the negative stereotypes that appear in the literature reviewed above
regarding the parental involvement of immigrant and low-income groups were very much
present in the discourse of the teachers at this particular school. All of the teachers, except
the inspector, described the immigrant parents as ‘disinterested’ (adia?8oroi) and/or very
little involved in their children’s education:
They don’t have a very big interest in the school, the parents. No interest at all. They are not
interested in coming in to ask [about their children’s progress].2 This year in particular no
parent from the foreigners came during parent
teacher briefing hours to see me. None. {do
they call you perhaps?} Very rarely, once a year. And if you tell them something, they don’t
improve it. Whatever you say stays without any result. (Lenia)
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Our [immigrant] students, I think, follow the trajectory of a student whose parents are
disinterested. They are not that different from a [Cypriot] student I had, say, in West Side (a
suburban area with a Cypriot population of low socioeconomic background) whose parents
were not involved. (Vera)

Granted, such remarks were almost never made by teachers without ambivalence as
they were very quick to justify the immigrant parents’ ‘indifference’ by appealing to
the financial and other challenges they assumed most of them faced. In fact, most of the
teachers often ended up back-pedalling and contradicting themselves, even during the
course of the same interview, when sensing that some of their answers may have had racist
connotations or may have not done justice to the parents. Influenced, thus, by the
formality of the interview context and the desirability effect, teachers would often respond
to prompts to elaborate on their perceptions of indifference by justifying parental
‘disinterest’ as a matter of low priority. For instance, after initially characterising
immigrant parents as ‘indifferent’ in the quote above, Vera’s take on the issue shifts
dramatically following the lapse of time as she backtracks to describe parents as
‘concerned’, despite the fact that she eventually returns to her original view about lack
of involvement:
Look, these are people who work long hours. They have many problems, financial and
professional, and I think most of them do not have the capability to be involved. But OK, I
also sensed a mentality where the teacher is still important. Even though, they cannot really
help them [their children], when you tell them your child does not behave well, they are not
going to let it slide. In discipline matters they are . . . [strict]. I think even though they cannot
offer much, they care. They are concerned with their child’s performance even though they
cannot interfere. OK, I can say this for those whom I was in contact with last year. This year,
from all the foreign parents who had children in my class, I didn’t see any of them, not once.
That is, they never came to see me. (Vera, emphasis added)

Unlike the teachers in Lareau and Shumar’s (1996) study who did not appear to be
much aware of the limited resources low-income families had at their disposal, teachers at
Mesogeios Elementary, despite their little knowledge of the families’ situation (i.e. their
living conditions, immigration circumstances, number of years in Cyprus, etc.), were
usually sympathetic towards the financial difficulties they thought these families faced,
thus acknowledging attenuating circumstances contributing to the parents’ ‘lack of
involvement’. More specifically, in describing the immigrant families’ situation as one of
‘many problems’, teachers explained the parents’ lack of presence at the school primarily as
a derivative of their financial problems and long work hours, and secondarily as the result
 260 E. Theodorou

of their low educational and socioeconomic background. In turn, they believed that a low
educational background instilled in the parents a sense of fear and inferiority towards the
school, and was responsible for their ‘different mentality’ in perceiving the school and the
home as separate spheres according to which it is the child’s role to study and the teacher’s,
not the parent’s, role to teach. All of the above were offered by the teachers as possible
reasons why parents were unable to have their children’s education as a top priority in their
lives:
Very little, very little involvement. I feel [the parents do] very few things. First of all, the poor
people work long hours. Their concern when they come to this place [Cyprus] is to earn some
money, raise their children, and that’s it. In education they can’t help them because they
themselves do not have the knowledge [. . .] Generally speaking, very little involvement, almost
none {with homework and attendance at school events?} yes. I don’t know if it’s because they
feel they are in a different environment. There is no way for me to know that or if it’s because
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of their work or if it’s because they do not share this mentality. A school event may happen but
they may not understand that if they bring their children and if they come too, they will feel
well. On the other hand though, they may feel they are inferior, I will go to a place, and how
will they see me? They feel they are not part of the Cypriot society yet. I believe. (Sotia,
emphasis in the original)
In a similar way to Sotia, merely three more teachers explicitly acknowledged the
immigrant families’ social marginalisation. Despite the fact that their depictions of the
parents’ attitudes clearly alluded to a sense of rejection and inferiority caused by a lack of
educational credentials or underemployment at low-status menial jobs, the teachers did not
frame it as the result of societal discrimination perpetrated by the dominant Cypriot
population. In fact, of the four teachers who saw immigrant parental involvement within a
larger picture of social isolation, only Vera critiqued Cypriot society for being
‘conservative’ and intolerant of foreigners, although she, like her colleagues, ended up
explaining the immigrant families’ detachment as the result of their own lack of desire to
integrate. Hence the majority of the teacher accounts, remaining at a descriptive rather
than an interpretive level, placed responsibility for social integration, or lack thereof, on
the immigrant parents who ‘chose’ to be distant from Cypriots because they ‘felt
embarrassed’ about their difficult financial situation and low educational level:
The children have birthday parties, but they [the immigrant parents] won’t take them. This
bothers me, that they don’t take [their children] to get to know each other and to get to know
one another as parents. Nor do they do so for school events. They will send the children but
they themselves won’t come. I don’t know if it’s their jobs or if they are embarrassed to socialise
with Cypriots. (Lenia)
I was surprised at their mentality, I saw a different way of approach or behaviour [regarding
parental involvement]. When we tried to do our first multicultural activity, they did not want
to participate because they did not want to be stigmatised. This to me was a shock. Neither the
parents nor the children wanted to [participate] . . . I think it’s because they come from a low
socioeconomic educational level. (Lyla)
Interestingly, then, class and limited financial resources were the most prominent
explanations for lack of parental involvement among teachers, even though one of the
major and most visible distinguishing characteristics of their non-Cypriot students was
their differential cultural and linguistic background. Yet, in a culturally diverse school with
the proclaimed desire to organise ‘multicultural activities’, the impact of culture and
language on home
school relations was not only underrated but almost entirely ignored.
In fact, only two out of 10 participants mentioned the parents’ lack of knowledge of the
 Ethnography and Education 261

local culture, including limited language skills in Greek, as a barrier to parental

involvement even though all the immigrant children at the school spoke a native language
other than Greek at home. Of the two, only the inspector dismissed popular notions of
parental denial to collaborate or of a different cultural mentality of separate spheres:
When their [the parents’] native language is not European, we have serious communication
problems between parents and the school. And it is no accident that these parents do not come
to the school. This ‘denial’ in quotation marks is not that they do not want to co-operate with
the school or that they did not do so in their country, they have fear, they have serious
inhibitions, how will they talk? What will they say? (Inspector)

As mentioned above, the second most popular explanation of parental indifference

among teachers was what they perceived as low educational background and aspirations
among immigrant parents. All of the educators, with the exception of the inspector and
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two teachers who maintained that academic performance depends foremost on a child’s
individual abilities, assessed immigrant children’s overall academic performance, both oral
and written, as lower than that of their Cypriot peers. This is consistent with findings
reported by Symeou and Demona (2005) who compared the performance of monolingual
and bilingual elementary students on a written language test. They concluded that the
former’s academic performance was statistically higher than bilingual students’ whose
overall performance in language was average (see also Alexandrou 2006). All of the
teachers in this study acknowledged that the parents were unable to help their children with
homework, even if they wanted to, since ‘they did not have the knowledge or the time to do
so’. Yet half of them still attributed a child’s low performance to the low educational
aspirations of the parents which in turn they saw as originating from the latter’s low
educational and socioeconomic background:
If their parents are educated, they want their child to be educated. If the parents are workers
and they are gone all day, they may not be as . . . , they don’t find the time either, they sort of let
the child to its fate, as do the Cypriots [of low-educational background], they have to . . . . But
because these children have the language issue many to a low or a high degree, when they are
not being attended to by the home, they cannot cope, catch up with the others. Whereas a
Cypriot child who is neglected by the home but has the capabilities, has more chances and
opportunities [to do well]. (Lina)
The argument that working-class low-educated parents do not value education, which
is why they devote little time to becoming involved in their children’s academic careers, was
also used in reference to non-immigrant Cypriot parents whose children were failing at
school and were supposedly ‘neglected’. Teachers did acknowledge, however, that
‘neglected’ Cypriot children had the advantage of knowing Greek as their native language
and were thus more likely to pull through academically than those who did not. The
assumption that ‘low’ parental involvement among low-income parents is a matter of their
not valuing education appears to be a commonly shared one among teachers (see
DeCastro-Ambrosetti and Cho 2005; Joshi, Eberly, and Konzal 2005). Studies have shown,
however, that differences in parental involvement may not be the result of different
educational values among low-income parents but rather of the different ways parents may
go about at pursuing them (Drummond and Stipek 2004).
All of the teachers, with the unique exception of the inspector, described immigrant
parents as ‘disinterested’ and ‘little involved’ in their children’s education, despite the
general acknowledgement of the hurdles immigrant families faced in their adjustment to a
new cultural environment. In the teachers’ eyes these challenges did not absolve the parents
 262 E. Theodorou

from their responsibility to be ‘involved’ in their children’s education; rather they

interpreted and normalised the parents’ absence as a symptom of deficiency: lack of
interest, lack of time, lack of education. Yet neither the teachers as individuals nor the
school as a unit assumed any initiatives to alleviate some of the barriers of parental
involvement they themselves identified beyond organising, or attempting to organise, a
handful of afternoon school-level events generally labelled as ‘multicultural’ with the intent
of demonstrating cultural traditions from various countries. In effect, teachers on the
whole seemed unable to reflect upon their role as school agents in the marginalisation of
the immigrant parents, whose existence they acknowledged themselves, as well as to
question the nature and usefulness of their practices, the demands these placed on the
parents, and the consequences they ultimately had on the children’s integration and
performance.
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Disentangling ‘involvement’: what, for whom, and how?

As discussed above, portrayals of immigrant parents as ‘indifferent’, ‘negligent’ and as
providing ‘no help or proper cooperation’ with the school were present in all teachers’
accounts (with the exception of the inspector). Their opinions very much resemble the ones
expressed by teachers in Lareau’s and Shumar’s (1996) study who took lack of parental
attendance at school events to mean lack of parental investment in their children’s
education. In reality, just like in Symeou’s (2002, 2003) reports, Cypriot teachers in this
study held a very narrow perception of parental involvement as a practice that should
facilitate their work at the school rather than promote the equal participation or the
integration of parents in the school life. For these educators, ‘involvement’ meant ‘help’,
and ‘help’ essentially meant ‘assisting with homework’ primarily, and, secondarily, ‘being
responsive to teachers’ calls’ either by visiting the teacher during parent
teacher briefings,
attending school events, or fulfilling teacher requests. For example, the teachers tried (but
eventually abandoned the idea) to organise a multicultural event for the parents and sent
out a formal invitation asking the parents to provide information on games, songs or
dances from different countries. Only one parent, however, volunteered to share that
information with the school, leaving the teachers feeling very disappointed and taken
aback by the parents’ lack of response to their invitation which they interpreted as refusal
to help or indifference:
Researcher: Do you have separate instructional goals for the immigrant children?
Lenia: No, we don’t set specific goals at the school for these students.
Researcher: Or any specific policy other than the remedial teaching which is suggested by the
Ministry?
Lenia: No, the only thing is that we may think of something multicultural; to organise it for the
entire school, and you saw how they behaved when we tried to do something multicultural.
Researcher: Did they say something?
Lenia: Nothing. My students didn’t bring anything.
Researcher: But you didn’t hear any negative things about it either?
Lenia: Nothing. Apathetic. As if we hadn’t sent out anything (emphasis in the original).
 Ethnography and Education 263

When commenting about immigrant parental involvement, all teachers referred to the
parents’ lack of on-site presence at the school. In doing so, though, they on the one hand
defined participation strictly in terms of physical presence during school events, and
especially during parent
teacher briefings, and on the other, devalued and disregarded
other forms of parental support of children’s academic careers. In essence, parental
involvement for these teachers consisted foremost of unilateral transmission of information
and suggestions regarding the child’s performance and behaviour (Symeou 2002) which the
teacher expected the parent to take seriously into account. Implementation of teacher
suggestions was taken to be an index of the parent’s level of concern, and investment in the
child’s education. More importantly, though, failure to uphold the school’s standards of
parental participation and to conform to teacher requests was not interpreted merely as the
outcome of low educational aspirations or disinterest but also reflected the quality of the
parent’s child-rearing skills. The degree of parental responsibility and care was eventually
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measured by the level of parent compliance to teacher demands. As Lenia noted in

frustration:
I think I have families who are not good in my class {you mean they are not interested [in
education)?} (She nods yes). Even Kyriakos’s mom to whom I’ve spoken on the phone about
her checking up on him and I even told her I would write down his homework so she can check
on him, and still nothing. And Vasos and Christos miss school many times a month. And in
October we had an evening meeting at 7 pm on a Wednesday (when businesses and shops are
closed in Cyprus) so they could come and ask and only three [parents] came from my class . . .
(all of them were Cypriot). Vasos’s and Kyriakos’s parents I have never seen, they have not
come to ask me. (emphasis added)
Herein lies parental involvement’s most highly concealed function: to exert an almost
indiscernible scrutiny of parenting skills manifested in an elusive intrusion of the school
into the home masked under the use of misleading discourse about parental entry at school.
In reality, the school’s assessment of proper parental involvement is essentially a critique of
parenting (see De Carvalho 2001), so in a counterintuitive sense, the more parents are
invited into the school, the more the school intrudes upon their homes and the greater the
likelihood that those who do not conform will be criticised and pushed away while actually
being held responsible for their ‘failures’. In fact, among the teaching personnel, only the
principal conceptualised parental involvement in wider terms; even though she, too,
considered involvement primarily in the form of on-site presence, noting just before the
following excerpt that immigrant parents generally ‘don’t come to school’:
Researcher: Beyond attending school events, on a day to day basis are they involved in their
children’s education?
Principal: I think most of them make sure that their children have all the necessary [things],
they make sure [the children] are clean, I see that they take care of them, also they ask what [the
children] need, [the children] bring the things that are necessary, [the parents] pay for school
trips, for events.
Researcher: With homework?
Principal: Unfortunately, most of them may try to help but they themselves don’t know Greek,
most of them, they can’t speak the language, write or read. That’s where we have a big problem,
very few parents are in a position to help their children or pay for someone in the afternoon to
help them. Whatever these children accomplish, they do on their own.
For the great majority of the educators parental contributions to children’s education
through keeping them fed, dressed in the school uniform they have to buy, and attending
 264 E. Theodorou

school on a daily basis equipped with the necessary school supplies and pocket money,
were so low within the involvement hierarchy that were neither mentioned nor taken into
account. Perez Carreon, Drake, and Calabrese Barton (2005, 495) report similar
approaches to immigrant parental involvement in their study when they write: ‘Nor is
there acknowledgment [by the teachers] of parents’ practices in the home and other
cultural spaces or the strengths their experiences as immigrants bring to their children’s
lives’.
As the authors suggest, when one shifts perspectives to examine parents’ practices in
the private sphere, reality may seem entirely different. All 10 immigrant mothers with
whom I had extensive formal and informal conversations, and whose families were of a
working-class background, perceived their children’s education as so important that they
all had their children enrolled in all or at least one of the following extracurricular
afternoon activities: private English lessons, private Greek lessons, music lessons, after-
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noon school in their native language, gymnastics and other sports at a respectable financial
cost to their family budget. Furthermore, in spite of difficult living conditions in crammed
and old housing where many rooms were shared and multipurpose due to space
confinements, all parents made sure to provide their children with desks to demarcate
symbolically and physically a ‘private’ space for their child to be able to focus on his/her
educational tasks.
Moreover, during my six-month presence at the school, all of these mothers attended at
least one afternoon school event of the few that had been organised by the school and,
even though none of them managed to come during regular parent
teacher briefing hours,
half of them came in at least once to talk briefly with the teacher either in the morning
when they walked their children to school or at noon when they came to pick them up. For
most of these immigrant families, getting to and from school, either during school hours or
after school for events, required tedious orchestration and reliance on outside resources
since they often had to make sure an adult, if not themselves then usually an extended
family member or a friend, was able to escort children to and from school every day. Given
that parents usually worked during school hours, that most of the families owned only one
car which was exclusively used by the father to get to and from work, and that mothers
were left to count either on their feet or on unreliable public transportation to commute to
school and work, it may not be as hard to imagine why it was so difficult for immigrant
mothers to leave their hourly paid jobs and visit the teachers during briefing hours or
attend afternoon school events.
Further indications of the immigrant parents’ value of education can also be seen in
three mothers’ requests that I tutor their children in the afternoon because they felt unable
to assist them due to their lack of fluency in Greek but did not wish for their children to fall
behind at school. Finally, during our conversations, six of these mothers expressed the
desire to see their children do well at school and pursue a university-level education. These
are but a few of the efforts parents made to become involved in their children’s education to
the extent of their ability and to fulfil the expectations set by the school with regards to the
nature of home
school relationships. The following powerful words of a Pontian mother
on her experience as an immigrant in Cyprus are revealing of the high value she sees in
education, of the importance she places on the upbringing of her children as well as of the
hurdles these families have to overcome on a day-to-day basis:
I am very glad to hear them [speak Greek] and pray to God that we may have our health to
work to raise our children and it’s better that they study [in college] because they have the
 Ethnography and Education 265

brains. Our children (the Pontians) in the country we used to live in . . . there is not a family
without a child who is educated. Eighty per cent of the people, not the children (i.e. the adults),
were educated. . . . We came here, our people are not bad people, very nice people all of them.
They want to work, have a family. But they are also in great need of money. Let’s say for
instance, the mother came from work at 1 pm (when school finishes), she doesn’t know have
they eaten, have they not? At 2 pm she has to go to another job to have money to take care of
the children, to buy things, to pay loans. What is she supposed to do? Where are you going?
What are you doing? Have you done your homework? How [is she to know]? She comes home,
she asks what have you done today? Where have you been? I did this and this, did he really?
Who knows? And the same goes for men. They have to work from morning till night, they
come tired, how are the children? [They are] Fine. And they are not so fine. They have no
house, no nothing . . . We give what we can for our children.
In considering all of the above instances of parental involvement initiated by the
immigrant parents themselves, one can hardly be left with the impression of indifference or
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lack of involvement on behalf of the parents. In juxtaposing the image of immigrant

parental involvement as depicted by the teachers with that which is drawn by the
immigrant parents’ own efforts to become involved in their children’ education, one cannot
but agree with Georgiou’s (1996, 365) comment that indeed in Cyprus ‘neither teachers nor
parents understand each other’s needs, attitudes and intentions concerning home
school
relations’. This conflict of discourses between home and school largely resides in how
parental participation is conceptualised and subsequently normalised through the medium
of power by the structurally more powerful who are both the rule setters and the monitors
of the game. Therefore, elaborating on Perez Carreon’s and his colleagues’ (2005, 466)
argument that ‘parental involvement or engagement needs to be understood through
‘‘parents presence’’ in their children’s schooling, regardless of whether that presence is in a
formal school space or in more personal, informal spaces, including spaces created by
parents themselves’, I would add that parental involvement needs to be re-conceptualised
as the totality of cross-site multispacial multidirectional family efforts to support education
that may include but are by no means limited to formal on-site presence at the school.

Conclusion
The present discussion was an attempt to deconstruct a seemingly neutral, and increasingly
popular, educational practice and discourse on parent involvement which masks culturally
specific ideas behind the authority of ‘pedagogical expertise’ through the example of
Cyprus. And although this discussion was particular to a specific context, there may be
lessons to be learned which are transferable to other localities given the vast expansion of
immigration, cultural diversity, and parental participation policies across countries. As
policies and practices of parental involvement stand now not only do they appear to fail to
integrate various underserved groups in schools, but they also seem to further their
marginalisation and thus, indirectly, undermine the democratisation of public education
(De Carvalho 2001). In framing their discussions around what parents fail to provide the
school, and subsequently their children, rather than on what the school asks of these
parents, the culturally specific and exclusionary nature of parental involvement practices
were never questioned by the educators in this study who, contrary to their intentions,
ended up shutting the immigrant parents out of the school life at the cost of the children’s
education.
The reasons behind the teachers’ inability to engage in reflective pedagogical practice
warrant closer examination and should not be divorced from the larger educational context
 266 E. Theodorou

of support and guidance from the MOEC in the teachers’ efforts to culturally,
educationally and linguistically integrate bilingual students in the school. All teachers in
the study felt that the time assigned for remedial teaching in Greek, which amounted to 40
minutes per week per teacher who usually had to tutor more than one student at the same
time, was insufficient to provide effective lessons in Greek as well as to cover the rest of the
curriculum material that bilingual students might need help with. Furthermore, none of
the teaching personnel had received any formal training or formal guidelines on the
teaching of Greek as a foreign language beyond generic seminars organised sporadically by
the Ministry. Hence, in the midst of policy demands for parental involvement, narrow
definitions of its form, pressure to cover the curriculum, scarce multicultural education
support, lack of extensive familiarity and contact with immigrant families, and
misconstrued notions of parental indifference, the teachers lowered their expectations of
the immigrant students, delivered less rigorous lessons ‘adjusting’ to their audience, and
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formed lower quality relationships with the immigrant parents so as to cope.

Despite their good intentions to be understanding of the families’ situations, teachers
nonetheless did not manage to escape a cultural-deficit perspective and reconsider their
demands. What is particularly dangerous about the emergence of such discourses is the
shift they bring about in the geography of responsibilities3 when ‘they deflect attention away
from the schools’ responsibility to develop effective programs for students from under-
represented groups’ (Delgado-Gaitan 1992, 513). The narrower the conceptualisation of
parental involvement, the harder it is for those who do not have access to specific resources
to comply with schools’ demands (see Lareau and Horvat 1999) and the easier it is for
them to be held accountable for their inability to do so. Perez Carreon’s and his colleagues’
(2005) notion of parental engagement provides a refreshing way of re-thinking parental
involvement in terms of engagement. As they explain, rather than focusing on the specific
things parents do, ‘‘‘engagement’’ also includes parents’ orientations to the world and how
those orientations frame the things they do’ (Perez Carreon, Drake, and Calabrese Barton
2005, 469). As a result, involvement extends to the cultural spaces authored by the parents’
themselves and beyond their actual participation in an event to also include ‘the situations
or contexts involved in an individual’s decision to participate in an event, including his or
her relationships with other individuals, the history of the event, and the resources
available to both the individual and the event designers’ (Perez Carreon, Drake, and
Calabrese Barton 2005, 469).
On a final note, reframing home
school relations entails welcoming, knowing,
incorporating, and building on parents’ life experiences and cultural resources in the
school through continuous dialogue not just between the parents and the school but
among other parties as well, including children and policymakers. At the end of the day,
educational policies and discourses are never value-free, uniformly beneficial or a-
consequential pedagogical acts. Hence, efforts to bridge the home
school gap need to be
founded upon the propitious seeds of reflective pedagogical practice, cultural critique and
deep familiarity and familiarisation with the significant ‘other’ in this relationship, namely
the students and their parents.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Diane Hoffman, Simoni Symeonidou, Melissa Levy, and the two anonymous
reviewers of the journal for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I have also
benefited greatly from discussions I have had on the topic with Loren Intolubbe-Chmil.
 Ethnography and Education 267

Notes
1. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the authors conceptualise social capital as ‘the material
and immaterial resources that individuals and families are able to access through their social ties’
(Horvat, Weininger, and Lareau 2003, 323).
2. I use square brackets [] to add explanatory comments to the participants’ statements in the context
of the interview, parentheses () to provide the reader with background information, and braces {}
to indicate my interventions as researcher during the interview.
3. I would like to thank Diane Hoffman for this term.

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