'Silent partners': Re-thinking parental involvement in Asia

A silent partner is one who shares the risks and rewards of an enterprise with other partners, but does not take part in its day-to-day operations. It serves as a metaphor for re-theorising parent-school relationships in Asian contexts. This paper examines how parents, teachers and students in a low-income secondary school in Hong Kong understand and enact parent engagement, and the factors that influence their practices, to understand parent engagement as a process for achieving social justice in education. The paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews conducted in 2017 with five parents, teachers and students respectively. It challenges mainstream ‘Western’ typologies of parental involvement which view school involvement as the ideal type. It elucidates how low-income schools can enable human agency to achieve educational equity. It also offers some ideas on framing an Asian model of parent engagement. Copyright © 2018 CDRI- Cambodia Development Resource Institute.