About
The background, cultural and social resources of parents can greatly impact their access to and communication with their children’s school community. Parents have thus taken on a consumer role in the education system, where they are expected to make decisions to ensure their child’s success in school. This dominant discourse is often assumed to be class and gender neutral, despite its origins in White middle-class motherhood. In Iceland, a nation consistently at the forefront of gender equality with little class division in the school system, there lacks a critical examination of how gender and class is connected to parenting practices. PAPIS seeks to analyze the ways gender, origin, and social class effect Icelandic parental involvement and collaboration with schools.
The project initially set out to interview mothers and fathers with a low-income status with little or no schooling beyond compulsory education, but to understand the breadth of systemic inequalities based on the intersections of gender, origin, and class, PAPIS has become the foundation of several studies including:
- Mothers of Icelandic origin in different social class position (MPP/WPP)
- Fathers of Icelandic origin in different social class position (PPP)
- Immigrant parents in different social class position (IPP)
The PAPIS project will have great impact on the research of systemic inequalities in education and education policy, as well as make parent collaboration and communication as accessible as possible for teachers, school administrators and education authorities.
