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Initial teacher education and experiences of the professional cultures of teaching contribute to teachers’ understandings about how to engage with parents. Drawing on qualitative research data, and informed by Michel de Certeau’s theory of culture and everyday life, this paper explores how everyday beliefs and professional practices that shape relationships between teachers and parents can remain relatively stable despite changing expectations of policy-makers and communities. The paper argues that equipping pre-service, beginning and experienced teachers and school leaders with research-based understandings about these cultural dynamics is crucial to informing professional practices that support meaningful and effective parent-school engagement. Introduction: Parent-School Engagement in the Australian Education Context Parent-school engagement has come to occupy a significant place in contemporary educational discourse, with widespread acknowledgement among policy makers, educators and parent organisations that schools and parents share responsibility for children’s education (Epstein 2010; Millar, 2010; Evans, 2013; de Bruïne, 2014; Daniel, 2015). Policy makers eager to see quantifiable improvements to educational outcomes have endeavoured to harness parental choice and voice as a means of driving student attainment and schooling excellence (Vincent, 2017; Mascini & Braster 2017), which has in turn shaped changes in the expectations and practices both of schools and of parents. However, the connection between parental engagement and schooling success, as well as the function and purposes of parent engagement, continue to be debated (Fennimore, 2016, 2017; Kainz & Aikens, 2007). This paper seeks to engage with these issues through the lens of everyday discourses of parent engagement that operate both in teacher preparation and professional practice, in order to consider how ongoing challenges in the relationships between parents and schools might be better understood. The rationale for policy mandates that oblige parent-school engagement rests in no small measure on claims that student outcomes can be improved when parents are actively involved in children’s learning, support school policies and programs, work in partnership with schools to support student achievement, and maintain high expectations of teacher quality and school outcomes. Such claims have been critiqued by sociological and cultural studies of education, with scholars raising concerns about the ways that parent-engagement Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 44, 12, December 2019 23 discourse sits within a broader context of neoliberal education reforms that ‘formalise[s] relations between parents and schools, resulting in new modes of governing the child, the family and education’ (Blackmore & Hutchinson, 2010, p. 500). In Australia, as in other Anglophone nations, researchers have pointed out that policy mandates that oblige parentschool engagement (Blackmore & Hutchinson, 2010; Barr & Saltmarsh, 2014; Saltmarsh, Barr, & Chapman, 2015) have brought about an institutionalisation of family/school relationships, in which ‘parents and teachers are treated as passive objects, assumed to be uncritically receptive to programmes that seek to improve student learning’ (Blackmore & Hutchinson, 2010, p. 499). Some have raised concerns about the ways that parent engagement has become a means through which parents are pedagogicalised into discursive norms of governmentality (Kainz & Aikens, 2008), while others have highlighted the racialized, gendered and social class assumptions that underpin notions of parent engagement, and that create barriers to engagement for some parents. These scholars contend that forms of engagement, opportunities for engagement, and schools’ responses to engagement are unequal, and disproportionately favour some parents and families over others (Vincent, 2017; Fennimore, 2016, 2017). Parents from cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds that differ from those of socially dominant groups, for example, have been shown to be at significant disadvantage in their dealings with schools by comparison to parents from non-dominant social groups (Vincent, 2017; Fennimore 2016, 2017; Quinn & Han, 2014; Yoder & Lopez, 2013; Auerbach, 2007). Thus despite policy rhetoric and initiatives aimed at forging stronger links between home and school, these disjunctions contribute to ongoing concerns about the extent to which the policy ideal of parent engagement is able to be achieved at the school level (Epstein, 2001; Bingham & Abernathy, 2007; Saltmarsh, Barr, & Chapman, 2014). In addition, questions have been raised about the ways in which this policy milieu has given rise to changes both in the professional cultures of teaching, as well as in cultures of parenting that have emerged in response to social and policy expectations that parents take a more active role in engaging with their children’s education (Landeros, 2011; Saltmarsh, 2015a, 2015b). As noted above, there is evidence to suggest that the ways in which parents have taken up the policy invitation to engage in their children’s education vary widely according to familial, cultural, and socioeconomic circumstance, and do not necessarily take place in ways that policy makers envisage, or that schools recognize and value (Fennimore 2016, 2017; Barr & Saltmarsh, 2014). These policy and sociocultural contexts raise important questions for initial teacher education (ITE), located as it is at the nexus of education policy, expectations of parents and communities, preparation of new teachers, and professional practice of teachers. While preparing pre-service teachers to work effectively with parents is an important – and now mandated – component of initial teacher education programs, a recent Australian study found that: ...while teacher education prepares beginning teachers for parent engagement in a variety of ways, more could be done to ensure continuity across programmes and in the tertiary sector more broadly to ensure that all beginning teachers enter the profession sufficiently equipped for this complex and important aspect of teachers’ work. (Saltmarsh, Barr, & Chapman, 2014, p. 2) Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 44, 12, December 2019 24 Just as preparation of the teaching profession is critical to parent-school engagement cultures in schools, there is also evidence to suggest that school leadership plays a significant role in setting the tone of welcome for parents and families, influencing professional practices pertaining to working effectively with parents, and leading school cultures that value and support the contribution of parents (Barr & Saltmarsh, 2014). In this paper, we draw on funded qualitative research studies conducted by the authors, in order to explore three issues that continue to present challenges for teacher professional practice regarding engaging effectively with parents. Our research has included studies with academics working in initial teacher education, beginning teachers, parents and school principals, and each of these studies found that parent engagement occupies a complex place in the landscape of professional practice. While many educators interviewed in these studies acknowledge the importance of working with parents, a common and recurring theme amongst participants has been a lack of clarity that occurs at the intersection of what is expected of them when dealing with parents, what to expect from parents, and what can or should to be done to improve professional knowledge and practice in this area. Conceptual Framework: Parent-School Engagement in Policy, Practice and

Anecdotes, Experience, and ‘Learning By Osmosis’: The Role of Professional Cultures in Preparing Teachers for Parent-School Engagement