The pedagogy of a father: Fathers’ school involvement as lived experience

Abstract

This study asks, how do fathers experience involvement in their child’s school life? The research has two aims. First, to collect descriptions of fathers’ experiences so schools might be more aware of possible ways that fathers experience being involved in their child’s school life. Second, to contribute to the existing home-school partnership literature (inter alia: Epstein, 2011; Barton, Drake, Perez, Louis & George, 2004; Hoover-Dempsey et al., 2005) different, phenomenological ways that parental involvement can be understood. In order to answer this research question, a phenomenological methodology (Van Manen, 1990; 2014) was employed to understand fathers’ lived experience of their child’s school life. The study involved two interviews with each of ten fathers of primary school children from a predominantly low-income, urban community in New Zealand. Based on the analysis of these interviews, the thesis argues these fathers’ experience of their child’s schooling is shaped by the pedagogical responsibility (Van Manen, 2015) to be there for their child. To make this argument the thesis progresses two ideas. First, that fathers experience schools as fathers, and therefore their school involvement needs to be understood in the context of the broader father-child relationship. Second, being a father is the lived ethical relationality (Saevi, 2011) of being-there as care, a relationship, and having hope. In order to understand fathers’ pedagogical responsibility, the analysis of this study has been developed in dialogue with the tradition of Continental phenomenological pedagogy (inter alia: Van Manen, 2015) and the writings of Emmanuel Levinas (e.g., 1991a; 1991b).