Sammendrag
The social and political transformation of 1989 in Poland opened up the education and ECEC sectors to democratization, which gave hope and expectations for parental involvement in educational institutions. In this chapter, we present how parental involvement is conceptualized in the steering documents for early childhood education and ECEC teacher education in Poland 30 years after democratization was initiated. Then, we describe regulations for individual and collective parental involvement that indicates that collaboration with parents occurs on a daily basis and that it is highly interpersonal and trust-based. These regulations also make it possible for parents to have great influence on the ECEC service through a formalized collective. Next, an analysis of teacher education standards indicates that interpersonal and cooperation competences are necessary to develop trust-based collaboration with parents to facilitate educational efficiency. Since there is relatively little research on how parental involvement is practiced in ECEC settings, we focus on how literature that is used by various universities and teacher education colleges addresses the issue of parental collaboration. This is supplemented by the results from our own small netnographic study and teacher and parental stories regarding establishing their own ECEC settings that we had access to when cooperating with the ECEC sector in Poland. In our conclusions, we focus on the assumptions made about parents in Polish policy documents, which presume the parents/caregivers to be White, Polish, and heterosexual. This might be seen as a reason for growing parental engagement in creating ECEC alternatives for their children. The “forest preschool” movement that we mention gathers together parents who find the mainstream preschools to not be good settings for either their children or themselves.
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