Governmentality in Parent-Teacher Communications

Official rhetoric emphasising the importance of 'good' home-school relationships for the common good of children/students is widespread. Drawing upon Foucault's notion of governmentality, this paper analyses different examples of parent-teacher talk and printed materials sent to parents of students attending various secondary schools in and around a large Australian city. The paper focuses particularly on extracts in which responsibility for student surveillance is negotiated. Analysis of home-school communications reveals that readers and writers, hearers and listeners are conversationally and textually positioned within and through such communications as subjects and agents of regulation and control within school discourses. Individual parents, teachers and students are seen to actively regulate themselves and each other by means of certain recurring conversational and textual practices. Such communications can thus be seen as practices of governmentality.