ABSTRACT

Research has shown that migrant parents of school-aged children are met by victimizing and pathologizing discourses, which restrict their agency and marginalize their contributions to institutionalized school-home collaboration. This chapter aims to advance these findings. Drawing on the notion of “respectable parenting” as normatively regulated and desired by all parents, this chapter explores educators’ and migrant parents’ experiences and thoughts about respectable parenting in the context of school-home collaboration within the Danish educational system. Additionally, the chapter discusses how collaborative problem-solving enables migrant parents to “enact citizenship” in Engin Isin’s terms and gain a sense of empowerment. The analysis is based on an intervention-based ethnography that included observations and interviews with educators and migrant parents who participated in a four-day co-creation process facilitated by the research team. Although the co-creation process repositioned migrant parents as resourceful and agentic, the pathologizing discourse remained unchanged, and the migrant parents’ attempts to express their own criticisms remained marginalized within the larger context of the Danish school system. Hence, the chapter argues that a pre-condition for migrant parents’ enactment of citizenship and ability to contribute equally to the school-home collaboration is legitimate discussions of what it means to perform respectable parenting.