Invisible Work and Hidden Labour in Ontario’s Public Education: A Decolonizing Institutional Ethnography of Mothering and Teachers’ Work

Abstract

This study explores how one institutional text, Ontario’s Parental Engagement Policy (2010), enters into and coordinates the work of mothers and teachers in publicly funded education. An institutional ethnography was conducted based on in-depth interviews with ten mothers and ten teachers of students in Grades 4 to 6 in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) comprising of the municipalities of Toronto, York, Durham, Peel and Halton. The data was analyzed using Smith’s framework that keeps the institutional ruling relations in view. The findings indicated that Ontario’s Education Act and Parental Engagement Policy operationalized governance through a network of subordinate texts and textually mediated mothering and educational discourse routinely activated through the text-reader dialogic of everyday work. While the efforts of the Ontario policy appeared to invite parents to connect with their children’s teachers to understand schooling and support their children, the data highlighted how the teacher union, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario’s professional judgement and professional conduct guidelines subjugate parental engagement by asserting teachers’ expertise over these attempts and efforts. I argue that due to the racist Standard North American Family (SNAF) ideology of Ontario’s Education Act and policy, as well as the power relations of ETFO, mothering work -a valuable contributor to students’ learning outcomes -is largely marginalized and undervalued in GTA schools especially when done by women caught in the intersections of raced-class, immigration trajectories and linguistic hegemonies of socially dominant languages within the North American schooling context. I conclude that ETFO and the Government of Ontario operate as isomorphic organizations with similar relations of ruling that create invisible barriers for parental engagement as well as the advocacy practices of equity-minded, anti-racist teachers. Social change recommendations include community-led, multilingual, outcomes-driven parent advocacy collaborations alongside teacher-led participatory action research to build professional capacity that invites and authentically supports parent partnerships in schooling.