Diverse Families' Conflict Management and Participation in Mexican Schools

Abstract

This article explores the experiences of non-traditional families regarding their school participation and their conflict management processes. It presents the initial qualitative results of the broader project called “Pedagogy of hope and nonviolence: educational proposal for the inclusion of new family models”, which was divided in four different lines of development. The first one, was a state of the art about the experiences of diverse families in educational spaces in the last 20 years in Mexico and Latin America. The second, analyses the regulatory framework to identify merits and obstacles related to educational inclusion of diverse families. The third, reviewed different studies that explore teachers’ experiences in relation to diverse families and their inclusion. The last line was a qualitative research about the experiences of diverse families in educational centres and the initiatives to achieve their participation and inclusion in educational contexts; this article focuses on this fourth line.

Specifically, the information presented is based on the evidence provided by six women representing different types of family: extended, reconstituted, single-parent, by adoption and homoparental. Even though an effort was made to interview families according to the specific established categories mentioned before, it was found that the conformation of families cannot be classified in one single category, since their family’s dynamics and members can be positioned in different categories at the same time.

The results show that the interviewed families’ participation is limited to schools’ requirements, which is normally directed from the schools to the parents to express particular needs or share information about the specific engagement needed. Although there is a basic notion of families seen as dynamic structures with diverse forms of conformation, these approaches are usually based on the conception of traditional families.

One of the biggest obstacles expressed by the mothers to participate in school activities is their lack of time, which should be considered in relation to other context elements, like their productive and reproductive roles, family structure, and the support they have for parenting. 

Whereas their participation is limited, families feel included as long as teachers keep them informed of their children’s performance and they attend school’s events, which is classified as an informative and fictitious participation (Simón y Barrios, 2019; Valls-Carol et al., 2014).

On the other hand, there is evidence of conflict in the relations between schools and families, but the expressions about this category are less systematic. This could be due to their lack of tools to express and manage conflicts, since there is a negative perception about it.

In conclusion, even though diverse families’ participation and conflict management schemes are the same as other traditional families, their diversity hinders their participation, because mothers usually play productive and reproductive roles, which makes it harder to establish relationships with schools. So, their participation is not inclusive, and they do not participate in decision making processes. The perception of conflict management perception agrees with what was found in other research (De la Peña & Lozano, 2017; Perales Franco, 2022), which highlights the importance of finding different ways of looking into it to explore more about this item.