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Studies of Portugueseand British primary pupilslearning science throughsimple activities in the homeMaria De Lurdes CardosoPublished online: 26 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: Maria De Lurdes Cardoso (2002) Studies of Portugueseand British primary pupils learning science through simple activities inthe home, International Journal of Science Education, 24:1, 47-60, DOI:10.1080/09500690110049079
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RESEARCH REPORT
Studies of Portuguese and British primary pupilslearning science through simple activities inthe home
Maria de Lurdes Cardoso, Escola Superior de Educacao, Castelo Branco,Portugal, and Joan Solomon, Centre for Science Education, The OpenUniversity, UK; e-mail: [email protected]
Asking parents to help their children by taking part in home science activities is a comparatively newdevelopment. We consider how Portuguese and British parents of primary pupils rose to the challenge,taking into account the recent histories of science education in the two countries. The pre-courseresponses of the parents and teachers are analysed, and how the parents interacted with their childrenis reported. The learning atmosphere is shown to be very different from that of school, being moreconducive to relaxed and effective talk. It is also shown that the families highlighted different aspects ofscience in accordance with their culture, and also that their children resented any break in the normalfamily roles.
Comparisons and contrasts
The sort of international comparison we shall be presenting here is not an exactand measured commodity; it is more an adjacent description of two projects usingthe same teaching resources, but working in different cultures and explored bydifferent researchers who shared these background cultures. The educationalsystems of Portugal and Britain stem from very different traditions, abstract andCartesian in the one case and empirical and pragmatic in the other (McLean 1995,Solomon 1995). Gender differences in preferences for physics or biology hardlyexist at all in Portugal, but persist in Britain. The two countries have sharedseveral centuries of friendship through times of both peace and war. This studywhich extends into the homes of Portuguese and British families, watching andlistening to them as they found out about science, will provide contrasts as well assimilarities.
The verdict of previous research into the effect of children working out ofschool with their parents is somewhat ambiguous. Dimmock et al. (1996) showedthat disadvantaged students’ work often improved after parents’ collaboration, butonly in schools with good parent/teacher communications. A study of take-homescience kits which were used with primary-aged pupils (Gennaro and Lawrence1992) gave excellent results in terms of enjoyment and attitudes towards scienceboth for parents and children, especially the girls. Yet, studies of middle or highschool students learning with their parents (e.g. Baumert et al. 1998, Heller et al.
International Journal of Science Education ISSN 0950-0693 print/ISSN 1464-5289 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09500690110049079
INT. J. SCI. EDUC., 2002, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 47- 60
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1988) failed to find a direct link between parent/student collaboration and schoolachievement, or enjoyment. The major difference between all those studies and theone to be described in this article is that we used direct evidence recorded in thehomes where the parents and children worked together. This meant that fewerfamilies could be involved, but it had the great advantage of showing what wentespecially poorly, or especially well, during the activity sessions.
In the last two decades both Portugal and Britain have argued the case forteaching a science which could provide a foundation for a sound adult publicunderstanding of science. In Britain this argument arose from the educators(Solomon 1981, Millar 1996), and in Portugal out of an initiative from theMinistry of Science and Technology, called Ciencia Viva (Science Alive).Having parents carry out the hands-on science activities with their children intheir own homes would, it was hoped, both improve the science learning of thechildren, and also spread public awareness of science via the parents.
We present here an account of how six Portuguese families used the Britishlearning resources - School/Home Investigations in Primary Science (SHIPS)(Solomon and Lee 1992) - to carry out the home science activities throughoutone academic year. The materials had already been trialled in a broadly similarway in Britain and reported in the literature (Lee and Solomon 1991, Solomon1993, Solomon 1994). New evidence from those British trials will be reported andcompared with the Portuguese data.
Primary education begins in Portugal and Britain
Although England and Portugal appear to have introduced science into the pri-mary curriculum at nearly the same date, there were, and are, substantial differ-ences between the two systems. These have complex historical roots. In Portugal,the rule of the Fascist dictator Salazar continued right up until 1972. This regimehad already reversed some of the educational advances made during the firstRepublic (1910-1926) when primary education was extended into the countryside,in an attempt to raise the salary and status of teachers so that they might become acountervailing force to that of the village priest. However, from 1932 to 1968, theauthoritarian Salazarist regime was imposed, with an educational ideology basedon ‘God, Fatherland and Family’ (Martins 1968). Teacher training colleges wereclosed and class monitors with no more than four years of schooling took theteachers’ places in the classroom, in much the same way as they had done inearly Victorian England. Thus, the contrast with contemporary British primaryeducation at that time, the 1950s, was immense.
Gradually, during the 1960s, free education was extended to six, and theneight years of basic schooling. However, this extension did not include the buildingof science laboratories in schools designed for basic education up to 14 or 15 yearsof age. The revolution following on the death of Salazar led to a whole series ofreforms. In 1978 a scientific dimension appeared for the first time in the primarycurriculum as ‘Man and Nature’. Thus in 1980, while Britain was encouraging theintroduction of science into the primary school, Portugal was also beginning tosuggest the inclusion of social and natural sciences, in addition the regular diet ofthe 3 R’s. In 1990, only one year after the UK Education Reform Act with itsdetailed curriculum of what should be taught, Portugal was still recommending,
48 M. DE LURDES CARDOSO AND J. SOLOMON
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in a White Paper, that some of all the sciences should be taught to a largelyunspecified level in the first cycle of basic schooling (6-11) years.
The differences between primary science education in the two countries aremore profound than this brief curriculum history would suggest. The compara-tively short post-Fascist period extending up to the present day meant that theparents of the pupils in our project might not be able to compare their children’seducation with their own. Also, there could be no Portuguese tradition of carryingout elementary practical work in science, due to the lack of laboratories in all thebasic schools, up to 15 years. It also seems that the years of using education andschool teachers as instruments of repression, labelled ‘Education for Passivity’ byFormosinho (1987), had also left behind battle-lines which had been drawn upbetween local and central powers. Indeed, these still make it quite hard to set up anationwide system of primary assessment which can include local or regionalaspects of school management (Lima and Afonso 1995). This implies that theSHIPS project, introduced in the small town of Castelo Branco in the centralinterior of Portugal would be an unusual educational event. Indeed it was commonfor Portuguese parents in this project to comment on how strange it was to includeeveryday activities, like making cheese from milk, under the heading of ‘Science’.They also commonly reported that learning science had been ‘quite different’when they were at school.
Recent Portuguese history has left behind, as we shall see, a workforce ofteachers who may feel insecure about their scientific knowledge and about theintentions of central government, and who seem to enjoy rather less comfortablerelationships with parents than those existing in Britain. On the positive sidehowever there is great popular enthusiasm for science, especially astronomy andfor science education, which seems more lively in Portugal than in Britain. Therealso seems, to British eyes, to be what might be described as a passion for democ-racy and equal opportunities which may be a legacy from the comparatively recentrevolution against Fascism. This sentiment certainly cannot be matched in Britisheducation where increasing numbers of pupils are educated in the private educa-tion system precisely in order to gain educational advantage over others.Unfortunately, there is some evidence that this Portuguese fervour for equalitymilitates against strong parent/teacher collaboration. It has been argued by severalPortuguese educators that parental involvement, if allowed, would only widen thealready existing gap between more and less advantaged pupils. The work ofBernstein (1971) on middle class control of linguistic code and behaviour, whichhas long since been discredited in Britain, is still powerful in Portugal and tends toperpetuate a suspicion of parental intrusion into education. This factor, not appre-ciated before the study began, did not auger very well for the introduction of theSHIPS project.
In Britain, the Plowden Report on primary education was published in 1967together with its large-scale statistical analysis of over 3000 children and theirparents (Bynner 1972). From those statistics, the role of parental aspirations fortheir children had been demonstrated as being a more potent factor for successthan their socio-economic status. The work of Wolfendale (1983) and others advo-cated the idea of ‘home/school partnership’ in primary education which hadbecome a popular educational slogan by 1991 when the SHIPS project waslaunched.
PORTUGUESE AND BRITISH PRIMARY PUPILS LEARNING SCIENCE 49
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Pre-project questionnaires
Due to these national differences, the preliminary investigations were different inthe two countries. In Britain the primary teachers were eager to enrol the help ofparents; the bigger problem was whether parents, many of whom might have littleinterest in science, would be willing to take part. Thus, a parents’ questionnairewas administered. In Portugal, on the other hand, where the lack of parent/teachers collaboration might have presented real problems, a questionnaire wasadministered to the teachers (figure 1). Two points stand out from the responses tothis short but interesting questionnaire.
a) The teachers were more likely to agree that parents might help their children to do‘experiments’ at home rather than simply to help them to ‘learn science’ at home.
b) Poorly educated parents were thought by these teachers to be more likely to helptheir children than ordinary parents. This surprising and even unlikely findingmay be based on previous experience when such parents have asked the teachersfor help. There is also the possibility that the teachers could be expressing a fear thathelp from the better educated parents might show up deficiencies in their own knowl-edge. A third possibility was that the involvement of better educated parents mightbe rejected to safeguard the pupils’ equality of opportunity.
Thus, the substantial difference between answers to questions about poorly edu-cated parents and ordinary ones, brings to the fore three points already notedabout science education in Portugal: first the general enthusiasm for science edu-cation; second, the insecurity of the teachers; and thirdly, the suspicion thatmiddle class parents might be trying to widen the gap between the more andless advantaged in order to reap advantage for their own children.
Responses to the different questionnaire prepared for British parents werecollected in the playgrounds of three primary schools when parents broughttheir children to school in the mornings (figure 2).
50 M. DE LURDES CARDOSO AND J. SOLOMON
1. Do you already have a Home/School programme? If so, of what does it consist? (100% agree, but only for social occasions) 2. Do you think that parents could help their children to learn school
science at home? Please give your reasons. (58% ‘parents could not/ would not help’)
3. Do you think that parents could help their children carry out
experiments with simple everyday equipment at home? Please give your reasons. (50% ‘parents could not/would not help’)
4. Do you think that poorly educated parents could help their children
to learn school science at home? Please give your reasons. (27% ‘parents could not/ would not help’)
5. Do you think that poorly educated parents could help their children
carry out experiments with simple everyday equipment at home? Please give your reasons. (15% ‘parents could not/would not help’)
Figure 1. Portuguese Primary Teachers’ Questionnaire.
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(a) An overwhelming proportion of parents said they would help their chil-dren with their homework, including some who added that they thoughttheir children were really too young to do homework.
(b) At first the idea of helping with science was less well received thanwas helping them with reading, with which these parents were quite famil-iar. However, rephrasing this question in terms of practical activitiesreceived a more favourable response, as it had done with the Portugueseteachers.
(c) The low number of correct answers to questions 3 and 4 was striking. Theintroduction of science had certainly been the subject of a letter fromschool to the parents. However there was, as yet, no timetabled subjectcalled ‘Science’. Teachers often included science in the general class ‘topic’they arranged for each half term. Yet, we can see from the data that eventhe title of the science topic being studied was not known by the majorityof parents. This suggests a serious lack of communication between schooland home at some unspecified level.
(d) The parents who said they had not enjoyed science at school were far lesslikely to anticipate helping their children with science. They were also theparents who were significantly more likely not to know either if their childlearnt science at all or what science the child was learning (coefficient ofassociation +0.63). This indicated that there could be a serious problem ifthese parents who seemed to care so little about their children’s education,and disliked science, were asked to help with the SHIPS activities. Thisfear did turn out to be justified in one case (see Solomon 1993) a resultwhich is clearly significant for equality of opportunity.
It was disappointing to find that such a large number of these parents had notenjoyed their experience of learning science at school. Although there can be nocomparable figures for Portuguese parents because of the more recent introductionof science into the primary curriculum there, it is tempting to believe that they
PORTUGUESE AND BRITISH PRIMARY PUPILS LEARNING SCIENCE 51
% %
1. Did you take science at school up to 16? 82
2. Did you enjoy it? 45
3. Does your child do science at school? 39 (correct)
4. If so what topic is s/he studying now? 35 (correct)
5. Do you help your child with reading? 89
6. Would you help your child with homework if asked? 92
7. Would you help with homework in science? 71
8. Would you help doing science activities at home with
your child? 83
Sample size 100.
Figure 2. The British parents’ questionnaire with results.
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might have been more enthusiastic than their British counterparts. Certainly thosewho took part in the trial showed a high level of interest in science.
We were not surprised by the generally favourable reaction in Britain to carry-ing out science activities with their children. Not only has there been a longtradition of practical work in British science education stemming back to thedays of Armstrong at the turn of the last century (Jenkins 1979), but it wasencouraging that 71% of those questioned added that they did already make thingswith their children at home which included cooking and making models. We weretold that some of these kinds of activities also took place in Portuguese homesalthough the lack of facilities in schools meant that very little in the way of practicalinvestigations took place there. Under the influence of the Ministry of Science andTechnology’s initiative, Ciencia Viva, which began in 1996, this is improving buthas not yet reached out to all basic schooling (6-15 years).
Carrying out the SHIPS investigations
In the Portuguese research a pilot study was carried out to find out whether thissort of activity would be well received in Portuguese homes and schools. TheSHIPS project activity sheets were translated into Portuguese and used in thesame photocopiable format as in Britain.
The original investigations for Britain had been devised and written to fit inwith what the trial schools were studying during each half-term of the year. Hence,six activities were covered in each of the two years in the trials. To make sure thatthe activities were suitable, all of them had been devised in response to a questionwe put to the class teachers - ‘What topic is your class studying this half term?’Sometimes the topic was about some elementary aspects of science, such as‘Light’, ‘Electricity’ and ‘Magnetism’, which was not difficult to match with asimple investigation. Other topics, however, such as ‘The Romans’, ‘Space’ or‘Elephants’(!) were more difficult, and yet none of them quite defeated us. Forinstance, when we heard that the British pupils had learnt about the Roman use ofseals and wax tablets it prompted us to write an investigation in which a householdcandle was put in warm water for increasing lengths of time and was then pressedwith a coin or the prongs of a fork. The depth of the indents made by the forkincreased noticeably with the time of immersion in hot water. The notion of heattravelling into the wax was a valuable conceptual outcome of this. Cooking alsoprovided us with several good investigations, as did weighing, floating and expan-sion.
For their pilot investigation, the Portuguese children used an activity withdifferent sized pieces of apple and potato floating or sinking. Then, in the mainstudy they used the following additional activities:
What does light go through?Shadows in the morning and eveningElectrical attractionMagnetism around the houseRainbows on bubblesMaking cheese from milk
The six families involved in the main Portuguese study had all volunteered to doso. A request was made for families to take part and the first six who applied were
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taken on. At a convenient time in each half-term the pupils were given an activitysheet by their teacher and took it home. (If an empty container was required theparents were sometimes warned about this beforehand so that the object was notthrown away.) In each case the home researcher contacted the family by phone toarrange a mutually convenient time for the activity to take place. The researcherarrived at the house, watched the investigation being carried out and tape-recordedthe ongoing conversation between parent and child. After a week or two, when allthe six families’ investigation had been completed, the results - work sheets withdrawings, or a model - were taken back to school so that the children could explainwhat they had done to their teacher in class. In all these respects the projects in thetwo countries were similar, except that in Britain twice the number of schools wereinvolved over a period of two rather than one year.
Quantitative measurements
One test concerned how much knowledge Portuguese children could remember.Two groups of children were compared, one of those who had learnt exclusively atschool and the others who had learnt at school and also at home with their parents.The activities carried out, or watched, were not the same at home and at school, sothe questions had to relate to the school demonstrations, but in an area wherehome activities involved the same topic. For example, there were experimentswith colours on soap bubbles at home, but with a prism at school. The childrensaw shadows at school; but compared the intensity of shadows beneath pieces offloating foil, kitchen paper, and selotape at home. In each case, the SHIPS activ-ities represented an extra but different knowledge input, and it was not surprisingto find that those in Group 1 who had the extra advantage of the home projectretained the knowledge better (see figure 3). However it did at least suggest thatthe two kinds of knowledge from different origins were both accessible to thepupils and were not separately encoded in the memory, which has been reportedin other research (Solomon 1993).
PORTUGUESE AND BRITISH PRIMARY PUPILS LEARNING SCIENCE 53
Figure 3. Percentage of correct responses. (Portuguese students).
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It was also possible to measure the comparative number of comments that thechildren and their parents made during the activities. These charts are presented infigure 4 as an indication of the near equal part taken by the pupils and theirparents, as would be the case in normal conversation. In Portugal, the time duringwhich any particular child was talking about their work during a class at school wasalmost negligible when compared with their talk with the family while doing theSHIPS activities at home. Often the school talk was monosyllabic - ‘Yes’, ‘no’ or ‘Idid it’ - with a large proportion of the class not speaking at all. In Britain where thepupils carried out practical work in groups at school, there was more exploratorytalk between them but, unlike talk during the SHIPS activities, it still accountedfor only a small proportion of class time.
One other semi-quantitative method of showing the roles that parents took onduring the activities was carried out. We defined these roles as ‘Preparer’, for thoseparents who concentrated on getting things ready for the child to use and thenletting them do the activity by themselves. ‘Partner’ described those who joined inon an almost equal footing using the first person plural, ‘Let’s try this’, or equalparticipation, ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ The third category we simply called ‘Teacher’and applied it when the parent was issuing commands or asking atypical ‘teacherly’questions (we will return to this point later). In figure 5 below we present chartsshowing the relative proportions of the total interactions between the parents andchildren in each of these roles. The relative proportions were approximately thesame in Portugal and Britain.
Language at home and at school
The wealth of descriptive data collected during the actual carrying out of the homeinvestigations is not captured by the quantitative data presented above. We needed
54 M. DE LURDES CARDOSO AND J. SOLOMON
Figure 4. Percentage of children’s and parents’ comments duringactivities.
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some much better way to describe the social aspects of the home activities. TheBritish literature on how young children behave at home compared with how theybehave in nursery school, provided one point of comparison. A well-known studyof four year-old girls talking with their mothers, and then later talking to theirteachers in nursery school was carried out by Tizard and Hughes (1984). Theresearchers simply watched and listened, as we did during the SHIPS activities,and what they noted convinced them that the home was indeed a very powerfullearning environment, probably far more so than the nursery school. The almostcontinuous stream of talking, arguing and questioning of their mothers contrastedsharply with the reluctant, almost forced, answers that they gave to questions putto them by the nursery school teachers.
Tizard and Hughes (1984) attributed this substantial difference to five factors:
1. The children learnt from home-based, everyday activities.2. The parent and child share ‘a common life’.3. There are fewer children competing for the adult’s attention.4. The context is full of meaning for the child (e.g. shopping for real meals).5. The close emotional relationship between mother and child.
Although the same kind of evidence was not available for Portuguese children ofthis age, we observed all the same points in our sample of slightly older children athome. Pupils in both the SHIPS’ projects were between two and three years olderthan those in the Tizard and Hughes’(1984) study. The Portuguese children gavethe impression of being quieter at school than their British counterparts, withsome, like ‘Neil’ hardly ever speaking. However, at home there was nothing tochoose between them. ‘Neil’ for example, was quite comfortable talking, disagree-ing with his mother, and offering his own suggestions.
PORTUGUESE AND BRITISH PRIMARY PUPILS LEARNING SCIENCE 55
Figure 5. Percentage of parents’ comments in three categories.
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Mother. Write with the pencil.Neil. I’m writing with the biro, it’s handier. Oops! With this foil you can’t seeanything. This (floating paper) has already gone to the bottom. (Reading) ‘Add oneteaspoon of milk to the water’.Mother. Do you want me to open it (the carton)?Neil. No. I’ll open it. It’s easy. (Laughs but fails. His mother opens the carton.)Mother. Ah, see? I’ll add one teaspoonful of milk.Neil. No, I’ll do it.
The familiarity of this talk and the confidence it gives the child is striking andmatches well with the approach of the phenomenologists. For them the points 1, 2,4 and 5 (above) would have seemed to map very well on to ‘the life-world knowl-edge of significant others’ in the rather stilted language such sociologists use(Schutz and Luckmann 1973). In the Portuguese homes, language differenceswere even more apparent than they were in British homes. The children werevery often addressed by their parents by affectionate diminutives of their fullnames and they responded using the second person singular ‘you’ which theycertainly would not have done with the teacher. So it seemed that home learningand talking existed in a taken-for-granted atmosphere which was part of a familiarenvironment.
At the end of both projects the parents were interviewed again. We asked themwhether they thought their children had learnt some science, whether they thoughtthey had been ‘teaching’ their child, what their own attitude towards science hadbeen like in school, and how valuable they thought science education would be fortheir children. In every case the parents responded that their child had learnt somescience and that this pleased them. Often they added that they too had learnt morescience. The majority of parents were unsure whether they had been teaching, orjust learning alongside their children. In Portugal where the parents had oftenreceived little science education, most were very pleased to find that sciencecould be learnt through everyday events. It did not seem to surprise the Englishparents nearly so much. Indeed, some of these parents commented that the activ-ities had prompted them to look out their old school science notebooks, or to buy apopular science book.
The concept of a ‘Home Culture’
In Portugal, as in Britain, the researchers found idiosyncratic attitudes towardsmany aspects of the projects. The families had even carried them out in differentrooms which had different status. In both countries the kitchens were the work-rooms suggesting that science activities carried out there were familiar. On theother hand the sitting room was far more neat and clean, a high prestige roomcarrying different messages about the status and familiarity of science. There wastalk about the cheeses that they liked, or that their grandparents liked, and theyoften spontaneously tried out their magnets on the children’s baptismal braceletsto find out if silver was attracted. Rooms and objects seemed to present spaces withdifferent cultural significance.
We were interested in the coherence of the responses given in any particularhome, and with the extended applications of the science being learnt. It fitted intowhat Solomon (1994) had called their ‘home culture’ and emphasized that each
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home is a kind of private territory with something like a tacit micro world-view ofits own.
Its (home culture’s) meaning may need to include the style and use of furnishings,practical skills in the kitchen and garden, humour and other personal characteristics,as well as the kind of beliefs and behaviours which we associate with the word‘culture’. . . . It may add up to a tacit expression of the only way of facing up to theworld which makes sense in that household. It will include a shared understanding ofthe purposes, practice and value of education.
(Solomon 1994: 576)
Thinking about homes in terms of a micro-culture is not a completely newapproach. The term ‘home culture’ seems to have been first coined bySilverstone (1994) in the context of how the new technologies of television, com-puters and video recorders nested in their purchasers’ homes. Like our ownresearch this was the result of observations made inside the homes. Silverstoneargued that television, for example, did not have uniform effects on the ways thatall the families lived. This was because it was accepted and used quite differentlyby them in different homes. Their home culture had predated the advent of tele-vision, so that the reception of this appliance was itself shaped by the existingmores of the home. The same seemed true of the SHIPS science activities,which were also fitted into the existing ways that the family lived by the way inwhich the parents instinctively used them. Also, we were soon to collect rathermore direct evidence that this intimate home culture was also very precious to thechildren that we were watching.
This is MY home!
We began this report on our research with questionnaires designed for parents andteachers. In this last section we will try to enter a little way into the minds of thechildren themselves, observing the activities from their perspective. No one couldwatch how the children carried out these simple science activities at home in eithercountry without being impressed by the ease and informality of the occasions.Jokes were made, smaller children restrained from joining in, and several of thePortuguese pupils sang or hummed to themselves as they filled out their work-sheets. This was in marked contrast with the behaviour expected of them at school.There, it was the teacher who asked all the questions and the children who usuallyanswered them with a single word or a short phrase. The teacher gave directionsand the children carried them out. When reports are being written in schoolscomplete silence was expected. A similar contrast, but perhaps not so strong,was observed between home and school behaviour in the British research.
In the SHIPS project both British and Portuguese parents occasionallydropped their loving informality and took on the role of the teacher. In everycase this caused irritation to their children. In the first example, the mother’steacherly question is only met with a joke.
Jane: (looking through a drop of water at a letter) Boy! It’s so big!Mother: (laughs) Is it so big? (Becomes serious) Then what is your conclusion?Jane: (Laughs and ignores the implication of the question) It must have had a bigbreakfast.
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The next two examples were more common. They occurred whenever a parenttried to get the child to write in the way that a teacher might do.
Bob’s mother: Now what letter is that?Bob: Oh Mum, don’t you know?
Neil’s Mother: Look at your posture. Sit and write properly.Neil (worried, trying to stop her): Mum, look, the tape recorder’s on!
In the British field trials the parents sometimes tried to make connections betweenthe science activity and their child’s school work. This seemed to break the easyatmosphere of the home culture and was always met with irritation in a similar wayto that which we have seen in Portuguese homes.
Mother: When you were learning about that at school did they talk about that?Child: (rudely) How should I know?
These snippets, together with the well-known refusal of children to talk aboutwhat they did at school, are suggestive of a feeling of insecurity when a valuedfamiliar role was being abandoned. To try to find out why this was found soirritating by the children we turned to what Harold Garfinkel (Heritage 1984)called ‘world maintenance’. In long-running relationships between people in anyhome, one of the aims of conversation is to provide assurance that mutual mean-ings and emotions can be taken for granted. There are famous, or infamous, storiesof how Garfinkel (1963) had sent his students home with instructions to act delib-erately out of character by asking them for formal explanations, rather than vaguestatements. This provoked extreme anger and irritation by breaking the expected‘mutualities’. In the present study, this role-transgression was troubling to thechildren because whenever the parent spoke like a teacher it upset the taken-for-granted nature of family relationships.
Several British parents made comments to us like, ‘When I ask him what hedid at school, he always says - ‘‘Not a lot’’ ’. In the data in table 2 (British parentsquestionnaire) and the responses to questions 3 and 4, showed a very low level ofparental knowledge of what their children were studying at school. It is temptingto see this whole phenomenon of non-communication about one culture in the baseof the other, as a kind of protective loyalty on the part of the children towards theirfamily and home. Letting the alien school culture intrude into this may be irritat-ing, and even destructive of the comfortable home culture, in the sense thatGarfinkel uses.
Conclusions
Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler (1997) have argued that even well designed schoolprogrammes which invite parental involvement will have only limited success ifthey do not consider the issue of parental role-construction. We have found thatmost parents do not relinquish their familial role when teaching their children, andthat this special and natural kind of parental teaching can be very successful.Another finding comes from research into pupils’ reactions to home-schoolingin the USA. In this study, the parents were subdivided into ‘ideologues’ whochose to educate their children at home in order to control the moral environmentin which they learnt, and ‘pedagogues’ who chose home-schooling for the educa-tion that they wanted to give their children. When the children were asked about
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the success of their schooling, it was those whose parents were pedagogues (parentsacting as teachers) who felt less comfortable about the whole process (Adams andPurdy 1996). It might well be that these children are reacting to, or suffering from,the more formal pedagogic role that their parents had undertaken instead of keep-ing to a caring family role.
In conclusion to this comparison between Portuguese and British familiescarrying out the SHIPS activities, we can make some tentative points.
1. The Portuguese teachers, for reasons that it seems right to attributeto recent history, are more hesitant about collaborating with parents,especially those who are well-educated, than are their British counterparts.
2. Many of the British parents had not liked science at school, were unsureabout helping with science homework but were happy to carry out prac-tical work with their children.
3. In both countries the children took a more active part in the science activ-ities at home than they did at school, and talked far more freely.
4. In both countries the parents usually found natural and companionableways of taking part in the activities which varied from one home to anothermatching and fitting into what we have called the culture of the home.
5. Any attempt on the part of the parents to take on the role of teacher wasresented by their children and gave rise to irritated or rude rejoinders fromthe children
Cardoso (1997), in the concluding section of her thesis, has suggested the followingrhetorical responses to the general question ‘How can willing parents best helptheir children?’
. Should they act as surrogate teachers in the home?
. Should they urge their children to behave better in school and listen care-fully to what the teacher has been saying, as parents have always beenexpected to do?
. Could they open their homes, their activities and casual conversations, tonew science knowledge which was relevant to school learning?
Our research has indicated that it is the last of these which is the more valuablecourse of action. This is because it uses the culture of the home, in the sense ofbeing familiarly idiosyncratic and also emotionally reassuring, in the context ofsimple and appropriate science activities.
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