The Strategies of Parent-Teachers in Provincial Brazil: Mobilisation for Academic Success and Personal Fulfilment in the Context of Socially Segregated Schooling

The aim of the current study is to understand the impact of parents’ belonging to the teaching profession on their offspring’s schooling, through analysis of the educational practices of families in which at least one parents is a teacher. A survey was completed by 114 teachers of the final grades of Middle School working in public and private schools in a city in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, who were parents of children aged between seven and fourteen years old. A subsample of 40 families was selected for semi-structured interviews, summing up 80 interviewed subjects (40 parents and 40 children). Classic and recent studies that analyze the family-school relationship served as theoretical references for this study (Pierre Bourdieu, Agnès Van-Zanten). The results show that the parents who are teachers are more intensely mobilized to support their children’s education, but that such mobilization does not happen homogeneously among the different families, related to the precarious class status of the teaching profession in Brazil. The social origins, the objective living standards, the networks of professional activity, the teaching experiences and the different configurations of family dynamics affect the educational practices of such parents. Detailed analysis of the data revealed the configuration of three types of families: “school success oriented families”, “personal fulfillment oriented families”, and “families whose school success depends more heavily on advantages of the profession”. The analysis of the education practices of these families led to the conclusion that they contribute to produce in their children dispositions for school success, responding to a context of sharp divides in school resources and social and racial composition and their own uncertain class status. Further, this educational activity is the fruit of the possession of certain “bonuses” obtained from the teaching experience and the hybrid condition of parent and teacher.