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Geographies of Education: Families, Parenting, and Schools

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Laboring and Learning

Part of the book series: Geographies of Children and Young People ((GCYP,volume 10))

Abstract

Schools are central to the everyday geographies of parents as well as children and have become a “new” space through which family policy is executed and families are targeted and appraised. Increasingly, schools have sought to influence children and young people’s behavior and achievement through work on/with their parents. This chapter focuses on the role of schools in educating parents and uses the example of family learning in the UK as a prism through which to explore geographies of laboring and learning. It draws on a wide body of literature as well as on our own research conducted with providers of, and parents involved in, family learning programs to illustrate a range of issues arising from the increased and expected participation of parents in schools and their children’s education in the UK. In particular, by tracing family and parenting policy in the UK and the increased professionalization of parenting in recent years, we demonstrate how parent-school interactions are both gendered and classed, being clearly targeted at certain “types” of families and parents. We argue that a focus on children’s learning and laboring must be placed within contemporary conceptualizations of family and linked to the learning and laboring of parents, specifically that of mothers. Attending to the geographies of children’s formal and compulsory education thus requires a focus on the relationships between families, parents, and schools and their increasingly formalized and regulated links. Placing children within in the familial context is therefore necessary for a wider appreciation of current discourses of learning and laboring.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Human Geography, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UK

    Elodie Marandet & Emma Wainwright

Authors
  1. Elodie Marandet
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  2. Emma Wainwright
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Correspondence to Emma Wainwright .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Tatek Abebe

  2. Department for Continuing Education and School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Johanna Waters

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Marandet, E., Wainwright, E. (2017). Geographies of Education: Families, Parenting, and Schools. In: Abebe, T., Waters, J. (eds) Laboring and Learning. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 10. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-032-2_9

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