The parent as 'subject' : beyond liberal discourse in parental involvement in early childhood education

There is a growing trend towards parental involvement programmes in early childhood education. In most of the programmes, the major objective is to enhance the parents' ability to facilitate their children's development, particularly where the conditions for 'normal' development are found wanting, This reformist trend is reviewed in the first part of this article. In the second part, the review will serve as a backdrop to a critique of liberal discourse in parental involvement, leading to a reconceptualization of the issue. The argument carried through this article is that the notion of parental involvement is central to the process of democratic control, and therefore needs to be grounded in a political project that engenders personal and social empowerment of parents. Such a project demands a pedagogy that recognizes the different voices, know ledges and identities that constitute the parental body; a pedagogy that is fully cognizant of the fact that parents differ in terms of location, cultural capital, habitus, and personal experience within the education system. In other words, there are parents who have benefited from the social relations that characterize mainstream schooling and others, perhaps the majority, that have experienced a sense of powerlessness. It is the latter category of parents that the project for parental involvement in question will mostly address. By adopting a language of critique, traditionally disenfranchised parents will dig into the past to reclaim their personal, class and gender history in order to subjectively under- stand why conservative and liberal discourse in education has failed them, with a view that they will eventually embark on a project of possibility that will not only promote equal partnership but also substantial transformation in the educational process itself.