The cultural shaping of parental involvement: theoretical insights from Israeli Jewish parents’ involvement in the primary schooling of their children

This paper presents a theoretical argument regarding the power of school to shape parental involvement in culturally informed ways. The paper emerges out of preliminary fieldwork among Jewish middle-class parents in a town in northern Israel, during which our attention was drawn to the intense activity in and around their children’s transition to primary school. This activity became a lens for the exploration and articulation of a theoretical claim, according to which parental involvement is not just a matter of the fit or lack of fit between the cultural capital imported from home into school, as posited by much of the relevant literature. Rather, the cultural shaping of parental involvement takes place within and through encounters between school and family: by means of the school’s cultivation of ‘proper’ disposition and comportment for parents, the power of emotional community and the recruitment of a key cultural symbol.