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Based on 30 interviews with teachers and parents conducted in a Swedish compulsory school, this article discusses the current growing body of research on home–school relations that stress the importance of parents’ engagement and involvement as a key factor that influences pupils’ academic performance. The focus is on gendered practices in home–school relationships. Thus, cooperation between home and school is paramount as questions of what type of community programs that promote family–community partnerships are explored. The study analyzes the construction of a cooperation practice that operates in two versions and affects performativity practices in both home and school, emphasizing a joint teacher–mother responsibility discourse as it draws on feminist poststructural theories and discourse analysis. The results indicate that both parents and teachers express attitudes that may raise questions whether they, despite the mission to counteract traditional gender patterns, in fact are dependent and rely on a cooperation practice in which mothers are made particularly responsible and thus contribute to asymmetric gender patterns.

This article explores the use of gender and diversity in research on home and school relationships. The review is based on articles that were accessed through databases like Web of Science, Academic Search Elite and SCIRIUS. The articles were analyzed using a model featuring focus of inquiry and perspectives on communication. Initially describing the research field roughly as two distinct but corresponding branches, Critical Studies research and Parental Involvement research, the focus is on how the research relates to diversity and gender. The importance of a power perspective in the definition of gender is stressed while considering whether some interpretations of gender in the research field are reproducing instead of changing existing inequitable systems and structures by favoring an essentialist perspective on sex and gender both at home and in school.

This paper explores methods that researchers, including students, use to gain access to research being conducted in their subject areas. I conducted a review of the literature on research methodology to find out how the access problem is defined and the points highlighted by scholars. The review was based on articles accessed through databases like Web of Science, reference books on research methodology, and handbooks on scientific writing. I then summarised the thoughts of two philosophers of science, Jorgen Habermas and Naomi Scheman, on the subject. The analysis focused on elements challenging the process of gaining access, including power and diversity dimensions. The paper concludes with a consideration of gender and diversity as operational frameworks in the process of gaining access and the possibility of applying a practice grounded in trust that would strengthen an inclusive process and the validity of a research project.

Education for all children has since the 1960s been a main goal in Swedish school politics. In spite of these efforts children's social and cultural backgrounds still affect their study progress. A growing body of international research is currently highlighting changes in society and education policy in which the importance of parentś democratic rights to influence primary education through home-school cooperation is emphasized. These cooperation practices may be harmonious and/or fraught with conflict. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how teachers and parents experience parents as resources in primary education with a special focus on what teachers expect from “ideal” mothers and fathers and what parents expect from “ideal” teachers. It is an explorative study using inductive qualitative analysis of 30 interviews with teachers and parents in a mainstream district in Sweden with an increasing immigrant population. The result indicates an overall agreement around what we label as a “mother responsibility” discourse in regard to home and school practices; a discourse, where mothers expect to become teachers’ servants on teachers’ demands. There are, however, discontents expressed in regard to these power relations. The article concludes discussing these discontents in relation to expressed goals in school politics on democracy, gender equality and parents influence on primary education. We recommend that teachers’ and parents‘experiences are taken serious in further strategies to include parents as resources; strategies that are in line with an inclusive and democratic pedagogy.