Parent-teacher meetings with refugee-background parents : raising questions about stakeholder positioning

With a focus on parental engagement strategies, this ‘think piece’ provides insights drawn from the perspectives of parents from Hazara ethnicity and their children as well as English as an Additional Language (EAL) teachers from four public secondary schools in Tasmania, Australia, that participated in the author’s doctoral research. It was found that strategies and practices associated with Parent-Teacher meetings in these schools differentiated between English-speaking and non-English speaking background (NESB) parents. The consequence of being positioned together with other NESB parents as if they were a homogeneous group, overlooked other social identity markers such as ethnicity, class, and gender. Whereas ‘mainstream’ parents met individually with their child’s subject teachers, this was not an option for the Hazara parents unless they could provide their own interpreter. Instead, they were invited to an EAL Parent-Teacher meeting where the EAL teacher and interpreters provided an overview of the children’s reports. It is argued in this paper that to ‘create a learning community with the child at the centre’, teaching staff and refugee background parents need to work together in sharing their experiences and knowledge of the child both at school and at home.