Beatrice Fennimore, professor, Professional Studies in
Education, published an article called “Permission Not Required: The Power
of Parents to Disrupt Educational Hypocrisy” in the 2017 Review of Research in
Education.
The theme of this year’s journal was “Disrupting Inequality
through Education Research.” Authors
with accepted proposals were expected to write a critical essay in a selected
area while also providing an extensive review of research in that area. For this volume, authors were also asked to
confront existing educational research that reinforced discrimination or
inequality.
Fennimore’s article is focused on literature documenting the
experiences of nondominant and minoritized parents who challenge injustice and
inequity in the public schools attended by their children. It interrogates hegemonic traditional
approaches to parent involvement that favor the school-based activities of
white middle-class parents while ignoring or silencing the efforts of
nondominant parents to confront discriminatory assumptions and unequal
opportunities in public schools.
Fennimore, who was formerly an urban school parent for 18
years, included her own participant-activist-research on nondominant parents
who struggled for equal schooling in the article. She challenged current educational
researchers to realize that studies continually “proving” the inferiority of nondominant
parents and their children enhance and support bias in teacher education and
inequality in schools. Rather, she
encouraged researchers to be “worthy witnesses” to the struggles experienced by
caring and involved nondominant parents who must fight for equal educational
opportunities for their children in schools.
This issue of Review of Research in
Education, published on a
yearly basis by the American Educational Research Association, was edited by
Maisha Winn and Mariana Souto-Manning.