We arrived later than expected. We were always late, and usually Peter would gently admonish us by telling about all the marvellous things we'd missed through our tardiness. This day he said, "Thank God you didn't get here sooner" (or something to that effect). Then he told us about his nightmare of a morning.

As a teacher educator and a mother, I have become a strong advocate for parental access to schools and classrooms, supporting my position either by citing the voluminous literature on the academic and social benefits of parental involvement for the children or by asserting that excluding parents from their children's schooling violates their fundamental democratic rights, or both. Over the years, I've come to see professional resistance to parental involvement in classrooms as self-serving.

Even though teachers claim to be working in the best interest of the child when they assert, as did one teacher nearly 20 years ago, that "the exclusion of families from classroom life provides a kind of clarity and order that they [teachers] need to focus on the educational process" (Lightfoot 1978), it's clear to me that professional territory is what's really at stake. The construction of the classroom as private space is but one tactic in what Spivak calls the "politics of exclusion" (1987). This exclusion works to conceal the teacher's work from parental scrutiny and protect professional authority in the classroom, thus maintaining the teacher's dominant position over parents in the educational hierarchy. For some time now, I have been convinced that whatever interests might be served by keeping parents out of the classroom, they are not the parents' or the children's.

Now, listening to Peter's account of what had gone on that morning, I felt my conviction begin to waver. I wondered if it might not be to a mother's psychological advantage to be less informed about what actually goes on in school or at least not to confront it so personally. Putting myself in this mother's shoes, I couldn't imagine how she could ever again entrust her child into Peter's care. Perhaps it would have been better for her simply to kiss her child goodbye each morning in blissful ignorance than to know, with the benefit of graphic details such as Peter's class had supplied that day, what could go wrong.

Isolationism runs counter to the stated goals of an educational system that purports to be educating children for prosperity and citizenship in a rapidly changing, open, and democratic society. Curricular documents and policies, which place active learning, problem solving, and critical thinking at the forefront in a democratic educational context, require that teachers not only expose the children to reasonable risks but actually teach them to be risk takers.

The real trick for teachers is to find the critical and delicate balance in minimizing the dangers and maximizing the opportunities for children's growth (Maslow 1971) while at the same time attending to their own professional needs for safety and growth. Maneuvering both is not easy, and teachers, however diligent, periodically find that what appeared to be a reasonable risk at the time was actually a mistake. They discover that they have inadvertently endangered the well-being or even the lives of children in their care. If this happens to watchful, caring teachers, and it does, what of the teachers who are not watchful, diligent, and caring? The dream killers and sadists we remember from our own school days are still in the system jeopardizing the psychological and physical well-being of children, much as parents and professionals might need to believe they are a relic of bygone days (Allan 1995).

Although parents might understandably idealize the good teacher as one who can and will preserve a safe environment, a sort of superteacher -- all seeing, all knowing, all wise -- to whom they can entrust their children unreservedly, and while there may be a professional tendency to proliferate this idealized portrayal of the teacher as omniscient, in fact, the superteacher is a myth. It is a myth preserved only by ignoring the daily events of school life, events that constantly demonstrate that teachers engaged in a daily struggle to help children walk the tightrope between safety and growth, while simultaneously walking it themselves, are fallible. If parents' peace of mind depends on their maintaining the myth of the superteacher, it's a peace of mind that can be achieved only by their staying away from school.

Sitting on the kindergarten chairs in Peter's classroom after school, as is our habit, we agree that having parents stay away from school is not the answer. It is the degree of parental involvement that probably makes a difference to the way events such as those of this day are not only handled but also seen as being handled by all concerned. The more parents there are in their children's classrooms, and the more often, the more intimately they get to know the teachers and the greater the opportunities for developing a sense of mutual trust.

It is this trust, built over time and through a myriad of ordinary little events and conversations, that carries the day when frightening incidents occur. It carries the day in an immediate sense - Peter knew he could trust the mother to do the right thing even when he was so scared he couldn't remember her name and called out, "Mother." And it carries the day, and the days to come, in a more enduring sense in that it becomes part of the interpretive lens the teacher and parents bring to the secondhand stories they hear daily from their children or via the grapevine.

Firsthand knowledge is a powerful thing. When parents have firsthand experience with their children's teachers being thoughtful and watchful, kind and dependable, it is easier for them to forgive themselves for leaving their children with mere mortals. This works both ways. Teachers who get to know their students' parents likewise can avoid the trap of constructing the mythical perfect parent, alongside whom all real parents are judged and found lacking. In the end, it is the proverbial "staying out of each others' business" that leaves children most vulnerable to physical and psychological danger and parents and teachers most vulnerable to stereotyping and accusation.

On the way back to Fredericton, we go with the flow of the Saint John River, with Janet and me wondering how Peter is feeling and speculating on how this day might have been constructed on the local grapevine had he not already established such close connections and a solid reputation with the parents of his students.

What might have happened if Peter had not included mothers in his classroom community? What if this particular mother had been only an occasional visitor as so many mothers are in schools, called in only to do field-trip duty and knowing nothing of countless occasions when the teacher has proved watchful, trustworthy, and caring? What if she had been one of a community of mothers who found themselves unwelcome in their children's classrooms?

We know of many school communities where mothers are excluded. We also know that rural New Brunswick women are well practised at coping with exclusion by embellishing on the smallest of available details and filling in the gaps to create their own version of what's really going on in school. Like the subordinated women Patricia Meyer Spacks (I987) writes about, New Brunswick women are powerfully good at gossip.

References

Allan, L. 1995. Traversing portals: Mothers' voices. Master's thesis, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada.

Lightfoot, S.L. 1978. Worlds apart.. Relationships between families and schools. New York: Basic.

Maslow, A 1971. Defense and Growth In As the Twig is Bent, eds R.H. Anderson & H.G. Shane, I08-I9. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Spacks, P.M. 1986. Gossip. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Spivak, G. 1987. In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York: Methuen.

Copyright (D 1997 by Peter J. Gorham and Pamela Nuttall Nason, Early Childhood Centre, Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick, Fredricton, NB E3B 6E3, Canada. See inside front cover for information on rights and permissions.