Families and schools in three education centres: Looking for shared relationships

Abstract

This article emerges from the PhD research carried out, titled: “The relationship family-school. The representation of a shared space”. It goal is not to build a theoretical basis of the conceptual evolution of family diversity, nor the role of school. But rather to know, describe, analyze and interpret the kind of relationships that are established between family and school through theexperience and conception of the educational community (families, teachers, non-teaching school
staff and pupils) that participates in this research, which is based on the case studies developed in three Spanish primary -including Kindergarten- state schools (two of them in Barcelona and one in
Tenerife). In order to this objective the focus has been centred on four fundamental elements: 1) selection and arrival at the school of all the members involved; 2) the policy that is developed in the school through the internal documents in terms of relationships; 3) the identification of mechanisms and strategies that are brought into play and; 4) the presentation of possible courses of action suggested by the actual participants of the research.