Listening To Children's Voices For Parents Involvement In Rural Middle School: An Ethnographic Approach

The main purpose of this thesis is that listening to the students'voices of their families especially their parents, and exploring the students'inner feelings and what they want to talk with their parents, we can gain insights related to enhancing rural parental involvement in their children's education. A key aspect of the approach is to capitalize on students'strengths in developing positive and empowering parents involvement in education.I started my study on a rural middle school in a certain town in Zhejiang. I adopted ethnography as my research method through which a large amount of authentic data is collected. The study lasted about one and a half years roughly dating from October 2009 to January 2011. It is a qualitative research with an ethnographic approach. A large amount of data was collected in the form of recording; narrative writing. The contents of these data involve home visiting and parents meeting, dialogues with my objects and weekly diaries of students as well. Terms like parental ideas and the looking-glass self are employed to analyze and interpret my data.I tried to answer four questions:1) How is the parents involvement in rural middle school.2) Are the children's voices valuable and what the students'voices about their living contexts? 3) Are there any conflicts between traditional rural parents'role in education and students'expectation? 4) What are the children's perceived roles of their parents.Listening to students'voices, I presented and analyzed many excerpts of students'weekly diaries and transcriptions of interviews of children's parents and teachers. Most researches on middle school students before were mainly achieved the information about children from the students'teachers and parents'descriptions without concerning to the children' voices. The analysis of the interview data and diaries shows those children'inner voices on their views of their new school life, their feelings about the changes around them, confusions of growing up, and the words they want to speak to their parents. Parents as the significant others of children, they participate in almost every aspect of their child's life. So make them heard their children' voices is crucial to enhance their participation in their children's education. The differences between the discourse in their inner world and their parents'discourse on them created a conflicting situation for parents/families and children. Parents in rural areas endorsed controlling attitudes were higher in directing and controlling their children's lives than in supporting children's autonomy. Parental ideas on rural middle school children are most concerned about their learning and monitoring their lives, however, these children's inner words focused on their growing up, being independence and freeing from their parents'control of their lives.With a multicultural perspective and the concept of "Folk Theories" and Cooley's "the Looking-Glass Self", this thesis offers a new perspective for studies on rural parents and rural middle school students. It tries to interpret the discourse of children's inner feelings about their lives and their parents' participation in their life, thus contributing to a new angle of understanding children's world and an effective approach to enhance parents' participation in education.