Abstract

While much research is focused on family involvement in education at the elementary level, little attention has been paid to the relationship of the parent and teacher at the secondary level. Family involvement at the high school level is crucial, as it is the time that adolescents make decisions that affect their future, the future of their families and society as a whole. This thesis takes a sociological view that the relationship between parents and teachers is important to the education process, and that this relationship is based on how the roles of parent and teacher are constructed. This is a small-scale inquiry and suffers from the limitations of such studies. It is the study of four teachers and four parents of students attending public English high schools in the Montreal area. Identified are the elements parents and teachers perceive and experience as important to their, and each others, role. It was expected that there would be important differences between parents' and teachers' perceptions and expectations of each other's concerns and responsibilities, however, this was not the case. Parents and teachers largely agreed on the functions and characteristics of the roles: what differed was the emphases they placed on the specifics