What the System Sees as Parental Engagement — And What It Misses
Nikita Jawa is an education researcher and policy consultant with experience working with Indian state governments and civic organizations. Her work focuses on education equity and parental engagement in tribal and underserved communities in Odisha. She holds a Master's from the Institute of Development Studies and is currently an ACLI fellow.
Contact the author: jawa.nikita2020@gmail.com
Keywords
Parental engagement; qualitative research; education policy; knowledge translation; visibility; India
Methodological Takeaway
Working within policy systems does not end at data collection. As lived experiences are translated into categories and reports, they are reshaped to fit what systems can recognise and act upon, bringing into view both what travels and what is left out.
AI Statement:
Author used ChatGPT for grammar refinement and editing.
In a focus group discussion, a mother from a tribal community in Sundargarh, Odisha, quietly stated, “We care about our children’s education, but the school does not always see us.”
Her statement lingered, not because it was surprising, but because it resisted the categories I had been working with. It was not just what she said, but the simplicity with which she said it— without elaboration, without emphasis— as if it were already understood. I did not yet realize how central this sentence would become to my work.
Before beginning my graduate program, I had spent two years working within Odisha’s education system, supporting the state-led ‘SATH-E program’ on improving education quality and strengthening monitoring systems. I designed and implemented system-level interventions, including conducting research and capacity-building initiatives. I closely connected with frontline workers—through regular contact and field visits whenever possible, despite the constraints of COVID—while participating in review meetings, coordinating with state officials, analysing data, and translating insights into reports and presentations. I had been part of translating field realities into forms the system could act on.
At that time, the work felt necessary. Large public systems require ways of organizing information — summaries, categories, indicators — so that decisions can be made and programs can be implemented at scale. Translating complex realities into actionable insights allowed patterns to be identified, resources to be allocated, and programs to be designed.
When I began my graduate research in June 2024, I assumed I was stepping into a different role—that of a researcher, observing the system from a distance. But that distance turned out to be thinner than I expected. I was not entering this space as an outsider, but returning to a system I had already been part of— one whose ways of seeing I had learned to work within— and contribute to.
My thesis examined the ‘Parents as Partners’ (PAP) program in Odisha, a government initiative aimed at strengthening parental engagement in tribal residential schools. My research had a clear objective to understand how governments design and prioritize effective parental engagement programs and to generate recommendations that could strengthen such efforts. Like many programs, it was built on a familiar premise: parental engagement was low, and improving it could strengthen children’s learning outcomes. I began with questions that reflected this assumption: How often do parents attend meetings? What prevents more active engagement? What can be done to improve participation?
These questions reflected how engagement is often conceptualized within education systems through measurable indicators such as participation, awareness, and responsiveness (Goodall and Montgomery 2014; Hornby and Lafaele 2011).
But in the field, the answers did not fit easily into these frames. It became difficult to describe parents as simply disengaged. I began to notice that what counted as engagement was already being defined in particular ways— and that efforts to improve it often worked within those definitions.
As I moved between conversations, analysis, and recommendations, I found myself participating in this redefinition — not only by documenting how engagement was understood, but by shaping how it was framed, categorized, and ultimately acted upon. Across interviews and focus group discussions, parents described their engagement with schooling in ways that were deeply shaped by their everyday realities.
A 36-year-old mother from the Bargaon block, for instance, described leaving home before sunrise to attend a school meeting. She walked to the main road, took a shared transport, travelled around 35 km to attend the Parent-Teacher Meeting, and returned late in the evening, losing a full day’s wage. “If I don’t go,” she told me, “they think I don’t care. But if I go, we don’t earn that day.” She paused, as if weighing the decision again. For her, participation was not about willingness. Rather, it was shaped by what she could afford.
For many families, engagement involved navigating trade-offs that were not always visible within school spaces. Daily wage labour, agricultural work, and seasonal migration shaped when and whether they could participate. In residential school settings, where children spent long periods away from home, these constraints were intensified. Distance was not only geographical. It shaped the very possibility of interaction.
But logistical barriers were only part of the story.
In a conversation, a mother told me about a meeting she had attended. She said that when she tried to speak, she hesitated and shifted between her local dialect and Odia before falling silent. “I don’t know how to say it there,” she told me. It was not that she had nothing to say, but that the space required a form of language and confidence she did not feel she possessed.
Odisha is home to many tribal communities, each with distinct languages and dialects (Mohanty 2015). While Odia functions as the administrative and instructional language, many parents speak in dialects that differ significantly from the language used in school spaces. What appears, in formal settings, as silence or lack of participation was often a difficulty of translation— of not having the words, or the confidence, to speak within unfamiliar norms.
Closely tied to this was a deeper issue of confidence. Many parents described themselves as “illiterate,” not simply as a statement of educational attainment, but as a way of explaining their place within the school. One father told me, “What will I say there? The teachers know more. We are illiterate people.” These statements reflected not just individual hesitation, but a broader sense of who was seen as legitimate within educational spaces. This shaped not only how parents interacted with schools, but whether they saw themselves as having a role within them at all.
As these conversations accumulated, a pattern emerged — not of disengagement, but of a mismatch. Parents consistently expressed strong aspirations for their children. Education was seen as a pathway to dignity, mobility, and opportunity, often in contrast to their own lived experiences (Mapp and Kuttner 2013).
At the same time, parents were closely attuned to the everyday constraints within schools. In a focus group discussion, a mother in Sundargarh put it plainly: “There are only five teachers for around 200 children… my child is suffering because she is not getting enough individual attention.”
Another mother added, “We want to help our children, but we don’t know how to support them with studies. We can only tell them to go to school.”
This was not disengagement, but a misalignment of how engagement was lived and how it was recognized. Parents were acutely aware of these constraints— large class sizes, limited teacher attention— and their concerns reflected an engagement with the conditions of schooling, not a withdrawal from it. What was being interpreted as disengagement often reflected forms of engagement that remained institutionally invisible. In this sense, invisibility was not only a feature of parents’ engagement— it was produced through how it was documented, categorized, and made legible.
Teachers, however, encountered a different reality. In understaffed schools, where they balanced large classrooms with administrative responsibilities, engagement had to be interpreted through brief and fragmented interactions. As one teacher explained, “Some parents are less engaged— they don’t come to the Parent-Teacher Meetings at all.” For her, engagement was shaped by what was visible within limited interactions— attendance, responsiveness, and presence. In such contexts, visibility became a proxy for care. This aligns with broader research showing how institutional practices often prioritise what can be formally observed and recorded, shaping how relationships between schools and families are understood (Dyer et al. 2022).
Parents who attended meetings and spoke in school spaces were more likely to be recognized as engaged, while others remained outside this frame. The issue, then, was not that the system’s understanding of engagement was incorrect, but it was incomplete, shaped by the constraints within which teachers worked.
It was this gap that the program I was studying sought to address. Implemented across all the tribal residential schools in Odisha, the Parents as Partners program sought to institutionalise parental engagement within existing governance structures. The program reconfigured Parent-Teacher Meetings from routine, one-way interactions into more participatory spaces, where parents were invited to organise activities, take on visible roles, and speak more actively within school settings. It also converged multiple government services—health, livelihoods, agriculture, and social welfare—into these meetings, enabling parents to access related services and entitlements in a single visit. In some cases, parents traveling from distant areas were provided with food, accommodation, and travel reimbursements.
These efforts responded to real constraints of scale, coordination, and accountability. When engagement could be seen and measured, it could be easily recognized and supported within the systems. As Scott (1998) argues, governance systems rely on simplified versions of complex realities to act on them—and research that feeds into policy is no exception.
In many ways, the program worked. Attendance increased, and parents became more present in the school spaces. But these forms of participation captured only part of how parents engaged with their children’s education. Conversations with parents pointed to forms of care, effort, and constraint that extended beyond these moments. The limitation, then, was not in the program itself, but in the assumption that what could be measured within it could fully capture how parents engaged with their children’s education.
As I moved into analysis, this limitation shifted from something I observed to something I was actively involved in producing. It unfolded through a series of decisions that felt routine at the time—how I framed questions, what I paid attention to, and how I translated conversations into categories that aligned with the system’s understanding of engagement. Conversations became coded transcripts. Codes became themes. Themes became categories— “low awareness”, “limited participation”, and “barriers to engagement.”
The shift revealed itself in a small moment. I was reviewing a focus group transcript. A parent spoke about travelling long distances, hesitating to speak in meetings, and wondering whether her concerns would be taken seriously. Her account moved between effort, hesitation, and quiet sense of exclusion—of not quite belonging in the space she was entering. In my notes, I summarised this as: “low awareness.”
The reduction was immediate. What had been a layered account of effort, hesitation, and exclusion became a single, flattened category.
Her words were simple: “We care, but we are not seen.” What I wrote made it harder to recognise. This was not a mistake, but a transformation: in rendering her experience legible within policy categories, I had shifted its meaning, recasting exclusion as lack.
This translation made the work possible. It allowed insights to travel, patterns to be identified, and action to be taken. But it also set the terms of what could be recognized. What moved forward was not the full complexity of what parents had expressed, but a version that fit within institutional frames.
It was here that I began to understand my role differently. Being inside the system made this difficult to see. The pressure to produce actionable insights, simplify findings, and present problems in ways that could be addressed was not external but a part of how I had learned to work.
Recognizing this came with a cost. Analytically, it meant that I could not fully treat my categories as neutral. The clarity they offered depended on a loss of texture of hesitations, contradictions, and uncertainties that did not fit easily into predefined frames. Ethically, it meant confronting my role in that loss.
I was not only documenting how parents were being represented within systems — I was reshaping that representation. The choices I made about how to frame, categorize, and present their experiences shaped what would ultimately be recognized as engagement. Without translation, the insights might not have moved beyond the field. But in making them travel, something was inevitably altered. This tension could not be resolved—only acknowledged.
I found myself returning to the mother’s words: “We care about our children’s education, but the school does not always see us.” What this process revealed was that doing public work is not only about generating knowledge, but about shaping it— deciding what can travel, what can be acted upon, and what inevitably gets left behind.
Making knowledge public, in this context, is not neutral. It involves translation, negotiation, and inevitable loss. And in that process, some voices—like hers—are heard, but not fully seen.
References
Dyer, Caroline, et al. 2022. “Connecting Families with Schools: The Bureaucratised Relations of Accountability in Indian Elementary Schooling.” Third World Quarterly 43 (8): 1875–1895.
Goodall, Janet, and Caroline Montgomery. 2014. “Parental Involvement to Parental Engagement: A Continuum.” Educational Review 66 (4): 399–410.
Hornby, Garry, and Raymond Lafaele. 2011. “Barriers to Parental Involvement in Education: An Explanatory Model.” Educational Review 63 (1): 37–52.
Mapp, Karen L., and Paul J. Kuttner. 2013. Partners in Education: A Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family–School Partnerships. Austin, TX: SEDL.
Mohanty, Ajit K. 2015. Multilingual Education in India: The Neglected Languages. New Delhi: Routledge.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.