PARENT_CITIZENS · Schools of Citizenship: Parent Councils at Public Schools in Italy, Spain, and France

In the wake of economic, climate, and violent crises throughout the Mediterranean region, Europe has recorded more asylum seekers and immigrants during the past decade than ever before. As these new populations seek to integrate into European society, the following questions arise: are there sufficient institutional sites and resources to civically incorporate these incoming individuals and families? More importantly, what are the appropriate and practically effective institutions to build shared values of tolerance, respect, and citizenship? The purpose of this interdisciplinary project is to investigate the public institution most directly responsible for civic education, public schools, in three of the highest immigrant destination countries in Europe: Italy, Spain, and France. Yet while most European wide civic education initiatives focus on school children, the focus of this study is parent participation on parent councils (assemblee genitori, asociación de padres, conseil des parents d'élèves) at schools. In many nation states throughout Europe, parents have the right and expectation to participate at schools through legally codified parent councils, yet they remain little understood as a vehicle for productive civic integration. This absence in the scholarly literature and European institutional initiatives is surprising given the established finding that schools are the primary public institution where immigrants interface with others and participate civically. In sum, parent councils at public schools are uniquely situated as a civic educational institution and remain nearly absent from citizenship education initiatives in Europe. In an effort to illuminate the viability of parent councils for civic integration, this study utilizes a mixed-method framework to build a conceptual understanding through qualitative methods in the first phases of research which inform a representative survey of parent members in the final phase of the study.