ABSTRACT
In schools, Local Education Authority offices, government departments, staffrooms, parlours and playgrounds people communicate about IMPACT.
Whatever IMPACT is, it becomes redescribed in ways that these settings can handle. We might like to think everyone sees parental involvement from a ‘perspective’, which suggests that as I move about I will get a different perspective on what parental involvement means from where I now happen to be viewing it, with what ‘interests’ I now have and so on. This ‘perspectival’ approach to the phenomenon of differences of opinion about parental involvement is, I feel, naive. It is naive because however much I move about I will not end up with a more detailed picture of the issues of parental involvement in education. What I would miss are the ways in which parental involvement is currently being constructed by the forms and content of the dialogue we are currently having about it. Furthermore it appears that the form and content of the stories we tell about teaching and learning are already partially constructed for us by the positions or places we habitually speak from within our culture. In this chapter I want to explore how cultural positions help structure the stories we are able to tell about teaching and learning and how the various participants (politicians, administrators, teachers and parents), through their talk, begin to specify what parental involvement must look like to be acceptable. I leave the reader to judge how and who decides where the definition of ‘acceptable’ comes from. The future of IMPACT and projects like it depends, I argue, on attending to these questions.
