Teacher-parent relations and professional strategies. A case study on documentation and talk about documentation in a Swedish preschool.

The overall purpose of the study is to contribute with knowledge about the different types of relationship that are established between preschool teachers and parents in the teachers’ work with systematic documentation of quality in preschools in Sweden. Based on analyses of how preschool teachers target their documentation towards parents, and of how parents are depicted in texts such as the annual quality account, the objective is to generate knowledge about different professional strategies that contribute to understanding and interpreting teacher-parent relationships as part of the preschool teacher profession.

signals to the parents that all is well. Specific incidents involving the children are seldom mentioned, and the newsletters do no report about conflicts between the children or between the children and the teachers. The study concludes that the content of the newsletters shows a wish from the teachers for the newsletters to be free of negativity and merely focus on ideal practices. The results of this analysis also show that the newsletters present two types of teacher-parent relationships that are affiliated with two types of professional strategies. The first parent-teacher relationship is one of trust, in which it is important that the parents can trust the teachers’ presentation of how content and structure hinge on the national curriculum, and how parents can get more information. This relationship is upheld through a professional strategy for maintaining a distance to the parents. The teachers depict themselves as being the professionals with professional knowledge, and they signal that the parents can ask for more information about the preschool, but they have no influence. The other teacher-parent relationship is one based on friendship; the newsletters demonstrate this relationship by taking on a positive tone in all newsletters. This relationship is upheld through a professional strategy for maintaining a closeness to the parents. The teachers depict themselves as being responsible for establishing and maintaining good relationships. This indicates that it is important for the teachers that they can strike a balance between their strategies for keeping a professional distance, while at the same time maintaining a close relationship to the parents.

The analysis of the field notes from the teachers’ meetings and their work with the annual quality account indicates that the teachers found it challenging to deal with the feedback given by parents in a parent satisfaction survey. The parent’s dissatisfaction was not actually included in the final quality account. The study argues that, in order to avoid having to deal with the ambiguity of the parents’ suggestions/dissatisfaction, the teachers entered into an internal negotiation that led to a shared understanding of why some of the parents were dissatisfied. The teachers developed a strategy which they used to obfuscate less attractive survey results and instead prepared a more “neutral” quality account.

Data was collected from a public preschool in Sweden over the course of a school year. Data consists of weekly newsletters for parents, written by the preschool teachers throughout the entire school year, the annual quality account from the same year, observation notes from the meeting at which the teachers made this account, and an interview with two teachers six months later. In total, 24 weekly newsletters for parents from the period September 2012 to April 2013 were analysed. The full-time teachers took turns at writing the newsletters, and a copy was sent to the school leader.

Löfdahl, A. (2014). “Teacher-parent relations and professional strategies. A case study on documentation and talk about documentation in a Swedish preschool”. Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, 39(3), 103-110.