"There's a Real Mix...It's Not All Doom and Gloom around Here!": Parents' Views on Raising Children in a Community Experiencing High Levels of Disadvantage.

In 2006 three primary schools and a community youth service ‘crossed borders’ by forming a network to improve student educational achievement in a community experiencing high levels of disadvantage. Recognising that they lacked the capacity and resources required to counteract the numerous barriers to learning experienced by many of their students, the network set out to bring families and community together in a common goal; to improve education outcomes for students over the long term through a combination of community capacity-building and coordinating services for families in crisis. This paper reports on the outcome of parent focus groups conducted in 2007 as part of a broader research project to establish baseline data for the network’s evaluation. The purpose of the focus groups was to elicit parents’ views about raising children in the area, what they felt was required to maintain and enhance positive aspects of community life, address the issues they raised as concerns and the potential of the newly formed network to make a difference to them and their children. Five focus groups were conducted at the three network primary schools between July and October 2007. Twenty-eight parents participated across the three schools. This paper will present the findings of those focus groups, giving attention to the social construction of space and place in parents’ responses, dissonances in the way parents discussed their community and the importance of lay knowledge in conceptualizing issues and developing responses to them. The way the ideas expressed by the parents have been taken up by the network in its forward planning will also be examined. Introduction In 2006 three primary schools and a community youth service collapsed borders by forming a network to improve students’ academic achievement in a community experiencing high levels of disadvantage. The network is located in an area designated by the ABS Index of Relative SocioEconomic Disadvantage (IRSD) as one of the most disadvantaged in Australia in relation to income, housing, access to services, school retention and participation, self-reported health status, life expectancy, and child abuse (Hetzel, Page, Glover &Tennant, 2004). Network schools routinely report high numbers of students with learning difficulties, poor attendance rates and low academic achievement (Peppard, Lewis, McMillan, Palmer, Lawson & Slee, 2008). Recognising that they lacked the capacity and resources to counteract the numerous barriers to learning experienced by many of their students, the network set out to bring families and community together in a common goal; to improve education outcomes for students over the long term through community capacitybuilding and improving coordination of services for families in crisis. The establishment of the network was influenced by the findings of research conducted at Flinders University, which studied five hundred families with children aged zero to seven living in the lowest socio-economic status Census collection districts of Metropolitan Adelaide (Slee, 2006). This research found that life for the majority of the parents and young children interviewed was “under resourced, stressful and isolated, and interventions are required that open up pathways out of disadvantaged life. ” (Slee, 2006, p. v). The need to open such pathways provided the impetus for the establishment of the network, its aims and modus operandi. As a result, the School of Education 1 ISBN: [978-0-9752324-4-6] at Flinders University was approached to conduct an evaluation. Funding through the Flinders Collaborative Research Scheme enabled the commencement of the first phase of the evaluation in 2007, the collection of baseline data. Commitments to social justice (McInerney, 2006) and recognition of the importance of community voice within the research process, led the research team to adopt critical inquiry methodology (Crotty, 1998) and to seek the views of parents, students and teachers as part of the research process. In addition, given that improving student academic achievement was the overall aim of the network, school data on student attendance, behaviour and academic achievement were analysed (Peppard et al, 2008). This paper reports specifically on the outcome of focus groups with parents conducted between July and October 2007. Parents’ views about raising children in the community, the action they believed was required to maintain positive aspects of family and community life and address concerns, and the potential of the newly-formed network to make a difference to their lives and that of their children, were sought. In doing so borders between the school and the community and professional and lay (non-professional) knowledge were collapsed, and parents revealed that concepts of space and place are never static and the borders between wellbeing and its negative, are often blurred and difficult to define. Structure and composition of focus groups The views of parents involved in the schools and in the network in a variety of capacities were sought. The number of participants and composition of the focus groups varied as follows: parents involved in the network (4 participants); parents who were members of the school council or had leadership responsibilities in the school (10 participants); parents drawn from across the general school parent population (10 participants); and Aboriginal parents and/or parents with Aboriginal children (4 participants). A focus group with Aboriginal parents was conducted because the area has a high proportion of Aboriginal families compared to other areas of Adelaide and it was considered important to highlight issues that might not emerge through the other focus groups. In fact there was very little difference in the views expressed across the focus groups and much concurrence about what was needed to improve community life. Parents were invited to participate either by the school principal or the school counselor. Aboriginal parents and parents with Aboriginal children were contacted by the Aboriginal Education Officer, who also co-facilitated their focus group. Participation in a focus group was voluntary, so the views expressed are those of parents engaged enough with the school and/or the network to offer their time. It is not suggested that their views reflect those of all parents with children at network schools, however there was a consistency in the responses across the five focus groups which suggests that the good things reported and the concerns identified may be relevant for many parents living in the area. All of the participants were women. It may be the case, as suggested by one group of participants, that the school-home relationship is seen as the responsibility of mothers or women care-givers, as is typical of most Australian communities, however it is also possible that a different strategy is required to elicit the views of fathers, for example focus groups held in the evening, after working hours (Peppard et al, 2008, p. 17). This will be further explored in the second phase of the project. There were three components of the focus group process. In order to open discussion parents were asked ‘What is it like raising children in this community? ’ They did this through a Photolanguage activity, which is outlined below. Then they brainstormed and prioritised ideas about actions that could be taken to enhance the positive aspects of community life they had identified and address the issues they raised. Finally the objectives of the network were presented and parents responded to a question about the potential of such a network to make a difference to the lives of families and the academic success of their children (Peppard et al, 2008, 17). 2 ISBN: [978-0-9752324-4-6] This paper focuses on the results of the Photolanguage activity, in which parents were invited to select a photograph that represented their response to the question, ‘What is it like raising children in this community? ’ In doing so attention is given to how space and place were constructed in parents’ responses, the dissonances in the way parents represented their community and, the importance of lay or non-professional knowledge in conceptualizing issues and responding to them. Photolanguage method Photolanguage is a relatively new tool in qualitative research and in the field of evaluation (Bessell, Deese & Medina, 2007). Historically the idea has its origins in the use of photographs by the influential Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire from the 1960s onward (see for example Singhal, Harter, Chitnas & Sharma, 2007), and the group work of humanist psychologist Carl Rogers (Rogers, 1986). French psychologists and psychotherapists utilized Photolanguage in their work with young people in the 1970s and 1980s and were instrumental in the development and publication of Photolanguage Australia in 1986 (Burton & Cooney, 1986, p. 6). This resource was used in the research reported in this paper. Photolanguage Australia contains 130 black and white photographs 9.5 by 6.5 inches in size, chosen for “their aesthetic qualities, their capacity to stimulate the imagination, the memory and the emotions, and their ability to challenge the viewer to thoughtful reflection” (Burton & Cooney, 1986, p. 2). Those photographs range from scenes of country, including desert, ocean and mountains with and without people, to rural and urban areas. The photos that include people show them in a variety of settings and engaging in a range of activities. As Ann Bessell and her colleagues describe, the photographs are “of a sufficiently general nature that personal prohibitions may be transcended as respondents distance themselves from their comments, and ascribe their responses to the images they are viewing” (Bessel et al, 2007, p. 559). They further point out that “the flexibility of Photolanguage appears to facilitate its use with diverse populations in a variety of venues a