to engage:
‘The feeling of being compelled, drawn in, connected to what is happening, interested in what will happen next.’ [1]
‘transitive. To attract and hold fast (attention, interest); formerly also with personal object, ‘to hold by the attention’ (Johnson). Cf. II.10.’ [2]
In Campaign for Learning’s first instalment on parental engagement I wrote about why we are thinking so much about it: parental engagement is crucial to successful family learning and raising children’s attainment. I also looked at some of the competing issues around understanding parental engagement, namely, how the term ‘parental engagement’ holds different meanings for different stakeholders in different learning environments.
In this piece, I offer an overview of the ‘parental engagement’ landscape in education and highlight some of the challenges in defining - and the cost of not defining it. Equally, I offer some reflections from other sectors which may help reveal what engagement does, and how essential it is to thinking and learning, so much so that it is not unreasonable to posit that engagement is experiential in the way that effective learning is.
Language matters – engagement
Could engagement – and learning – be a matter of communication and its resonances? In consultation with peers about engagement, I asked what engagement felt like. Several ideas emerged: belonging, connection, agency, values and feeling valued, and empathy – all ingredients to intrinsic learning and sustaining motivation. One key factor that also surfaced was language. When we put thoughts to words, we externalize our inner experience and feelings, we bring them out into the world, often in a way that is shared. To name is to exist, validate and connect, even if we disagree. Similarly, a great deal of engagement practices involve conversation, sustained shared thinking and active, attentive – listening.
Why does coming to a shared understanding of engagement matter?
‘Engagement’ is an oft used and misunderstood term; a hyponym that represents many different concepts and practices. Jones and Palikara (2023) share this view and explain that ‘there appears to be an underlying assumption that the various stakeholders share an understanding of – and the aspirations for – parental engagement. Yet, there has been very little examination of whether parents’, teachers’ and school leaders’ conceptions of parental engagement are aligned with those of researchers and policymakers.’ [3] This view is shared by Janet Goodall, in her paper, Engaging Parents in Raising Achievement: Do Parents Know they Matter? 2007 [4]. Dr Rob Briner, an academic researching workplace performance engagement, also shares this view and makes the point that [employee] engagement has developed as a concept and a practice, referring to behaviours, attitudes, feelings and the conditions of environment. He says that ‘not being able to define it leads to confusion and undesired outcomes.’ [5] He cites Saks (2008) explaining that, ‘…if the meaning of engagement ‘‘bleeds’’ into so many other more developed constructs, then engagement just becomes an umbrella term for whatever one wants it to be.’ [6]
A foundational shared understanding of parental engagement is vital to building practice and policy, and enhancing engagement in the family, home and school-partnership learning environments.
Some reflections outside parental engagement
A few more reflections from other sectors may be helpful in reference to parental engagement and learning. I refer to the first quote at the top which comes from a review of a dance performance. I think the arts and humanities are useful in understanding what it means to engage because like learning, generally, engagement is experiential, relational, phenomenological, i.e. related to direct experience, cognition, and (inter) subjectivity. Campaign for Learning’s definition is valuable here:
''Learning is a process of active engagement with experience. It is what we do when we want to make sense of the world. It may involve the development or deepening of skills, knowledge, understanding, awareness, values, ideas and feelings, or an increase in the capacity to reflect. Effective learning leads to change, development and the desire to learn more." [7]
In John Dewey’s book Experience and Education, he discusses the ‘experiential continuum’ in which learning is posited as a growth process, unequivocally experiential and social, in which the external environment is as important to internal factors, i.e. whatever conditions interact with personal needs, purposes and capacities to create the experience which is had [8]. He also describes effective experience as arousing curiosity, agency, setting up the desire and purpose to learn and the significance of inciting the ‘desire to go on learning’ in the future.
Dewey’s thoughts on the relationality and environmental factors that promote personal growth resonate with the NORC study on Outcomes of Arts Engagement, University of Chicago, which are pro-social, situational, relationship and identity-focused (engendering a sense of social inclusion and belonging, and transmitting reinforcing or reimagining shared cultural identities.) [9] Dr Eric Jensen, a sociologist at Warwick University studies public engagement and engagement impact; key ideas from his research are that the aims of engagement are collaborative, empowering, informative, consultative and involving, in other words, relational, situational and social. [10] Jensen’s views reflect those of the Arts’ Council which define engagement as agentive passive or active audience participation in different forms of activity, such as consultation or feedback. [11]
Closing thoughts
In Antoine de St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince the fox says to the prince ‘you can only see things clearly with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.’ These thoughts remind me of parental engagement as explained by a deputy head teacher who, when asked why it is important, said, “I don’t know, I just know it is, and I’m not going to give up!” [12] Is it enough to know it matters? It’s certainly worth celebrating that we share in knowing it matters. That parental engagement consumes an array of research and practices in education, that the efforts to raise awareness is seen as valuable by our supporters, even if we are struggling to understand how to demonstrate it, adds to the urgency to pin down parental engagement. When we want to exact changes in feelings, thoughts and behaviours my conviction is that we need concrete examples of the changes we want to see and how to make them.
We can see that engagement is two-way, dialogic, situational, social and relational. Moreover, the two definitions of ‘engage’ above, in relation to dance performance, and from the OED both describe thinking processes, or cognition. If we consider what cognitive engagement feels like, are we not simultaneously present and moving to new ways of thinking and understanding? Our attention is held, our thinking teased in a tension between thinking about what we already know and our ability to think in new ways, about what we don’t know and want to discover, in other words, feeling motivated to think differently and find out more, and safe enough to entertain uncertainty. There is also the aspect of availability to new thinking, being alert or encouraged by an educator or family adult, to use thinking skills to create new thoughts. Project Zero at Harvard calls this overlap, of ‘ability, inclination and sensitivity,’ thinking dispositions or habits of mind. [13] What researchers have found – over decades of research around thinking dispositions - is that the majority of learners have the thinking skills and motivation needed to make new thoughts and solve problems, but often don’t know the best time or way to use them. Project Zero has a library of ‘thinking routines’ as resources for developing thinking which could be useful to us. [14]
In Jones’ and Palikora’s research on parental engagement the parents they surveyed said they felt that they had the skills to support their children’s learning, while in contrast, senior leaders at a school did not believe parents and carers did (this may be an additional misunderstanding of what skills are). I’d like to suggest that engagement – between parents and children, and between parents and other communities like school - could be catalysed by stoking alertness to ways and opportunities to connect and exchange. But all parties need to see the value of doing so first, which leads back to motivation.
In the next instalment I will be writing about the ‘home learning environment’.
Boosting parental engagement in learning - our project
We want all parents to know how important they are to their child’s learning and feel motivated and confident to engage. At Campaign for Learning, we are developing a parent-focused campaign using high-quality film to boost parental engagement in learning and widen understanding about what it is.
Alongside the Family Learning Festival (5 October – 3 November), we will launch a short film to highlight the importance of parental engagement in learning produced by the Volunteers’ Film Scheme 2024 X Media Trust with director Scott Pickup. This is all part of a larger project supported by the Fair Education Alliance Innovation Award.
On Thursday 8 July, we have an upcoming workshop, ‘Rethinking parental engagement in learning’, delivered by our Director, Juliette Collier. A parental engagement themed networking event will also be taking place on Wednesday 16 October.
We’d love to read your thoughts on engagement too – you can post them here.
We hope you will join the conversation and we look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events!
1 Emery Schubert; Kim Vince, Catherine J. Stevens (2013), “Identifying Regions of Good Agreement among Responders in Engagement with a Piece of Live Dance”, in Empirical Studies of the Arts[1], volume 31, issue 1, →DOI, pages 4)
2 https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=engage
3 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2023.990204/full
4 https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/6639/1/DCSF-RW004.pdf
5 https://engageforsuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Rob-Briner.pdf
6 Saks AM (2008), ‘The meaning and bleeding of employee engagement: How muddy is the water?’, Industrial and Organisational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, Vol. 1, pp. 40-43
7 https://www.campaign-for-learning.org.uk/Web/CFL/About-Us/About-Us.aspx
8 Dewey, J. Experience and Education. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1997.
9 https://www.norc.org/content/dam/norc-org/pdfs/NORC%20Outcomes%20of%20Arts%20Engagement%20-%20Full%20Report.pdf
10 https://indico.ictp.it/event/a10226/session/2/contribution/1/material/0/0.pdf
11 https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/Audience_development_and_marketing_and_Grants_for_the_Arts_Jan2016.docx
12 https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/id/eprint/6639/1/DCSF-RW004.pdf
13 https://youtu.be/GalkLjxlBaY?si=r71fMxW4bWOWAPle
14 https://pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines