Review of The Essential Conversation, by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other, by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Random House, 2003, a review by David Mallery. A version of this review will appear in late in 2003 in Hope Magazine, Box 160, Naskeag Road, Brooklin, ME 0461, http://www.hopemag.com.

"What parents and teachers can learn from each other...." is something Sara Lawrence Lightfoot knows plenty about. She also knows, and tells us in this eloquent, passionately moving and illuminating book, that too often parents and teachers are in some kind of intense competition, even in active warfare, defending their own sensitivities, their own personal histories, their own fears, their own pride in being important to the child in the middle. Too often we hear the parents taking about uncomprehending, or arrogant, or unaware teachers who "really don't know or care for our child," or we hear teachers bemoaning terrible parents who throw weight, who attack or humiliate teachers. Amid all this, Lawrence-Lightfoot searches out what is really going on in the parent-teacher encounter, "the essential conversation," and what needs to happen if the child is to flourish—and if the parent, the teacher and the school can be effective.

As in all of Sara Lawrence Lightfoot's work, the "voice" is so extraordinarily moving, so evocative, that one sees better, hears better, empathizes better, cares more, as a result of one's encounter with this writer-artist-researcher-social scientist.

Lawrence-Lightfoot could so easily stay within the confines of intensely appreciative and admiring graduate students at Harvard and among celebratory audiences of teachers, parents, communities who come to hear her speak and seek her inspiration. And her books are so widely read, savored and honored that she could say, "That's enough." Yet here in this new book she takes on the toughest, most emotion-fraught and passions-evoking relationship in the education of our children, "the essential conversation" between the parent and the teacher.

She is so astute about both parents and teachers—her extraordinary empathy and rich experience connect her passionately with both. She launched her study, vividly aware that "there were no rituals or arenas where parents could come to gather for mutual support, for information sharing, for strategizing, for catharsis," and that "parents tended to be secretive and furtive about their worries." Yet she saw that "it was not only parents who felt isolated and vulnerable. I could also tell that teachers had their own deep concerns, their own sense of exposure and vulnerability." And she knew that neither parents nor teachers got any preparation or training to carry on this "essential conversation."

Her study brought her to a much-changed educational landscape from the one she was exploring twenty five years ago for The Good High School She wanted to shift her focus to "the more intimate encounters between parents and teachers," and to do work that goes "below the polite surface of adult encounters to document the often rancorous and treacherous underbelly of real feelings, and that examines what gets both revealed and masked in the highly ritualized meetings between parents and teachers.

Most of all, this is a work of "timely and passionate self-exploration," drawing on Lawrence-Lightfoot's experience as a social scientist,, as a student of families and schools, as a mother of two, as a daughter with a vivid sense of her own parents' encounters her teachers and schools. She has traveled for two years around the country encountering parents and teachers in as different settings as one could imagine, in public, private and parochial schools, city suburban, rural. Out of these encounters, she has chosen ten teachers for in-depth conversations, "gifted practitioners, regarded as skilled, empathic and caring in their dealing with parents." They had their horror stories, as did the parents she encountered, but her heart and intention lie in examining "goodness," rather than pathology. She sat in on parent conferences, talked extensively with parents as well as teachers, listened, remembered, connected, reflected. The resulting book is an inspiration and a revelation to any parents and teachers "negotiating the treacherous and tender terrain—the physical,psychological, intellectual, and metaphoric—between them."

Recognition works magically as one reads this book. scene after scene, conversation after conversation, faces, voices, spoken and unspoken feelings. But Lawrence-Lightfoot takes us way past recognition into revelation— into what is "really" being said, what underlying feelings, fears, struggles, hopes abound in parent-teacher encounters. From the first chapter, we see, really see, and hear, children, teachers, parents, voices, the "portraits" so vivid, and Lawrence-Lightfoot's responses so extraordinarily astute and eloquent. She presents these people, these scenes, to us, allows us to enter the conversation ourselves in a powerful way. The reader says, as Lawrence-Lightfoot describes and comments on the way parents and teachers bring their personal histories to the encounter, "Oh, of course...". Yet it is likely that we never "understood" in just this way. (She speaks of The Doorknob Phenomenon, as in "That same thing happened to me in fifth grade, and I swear it is not going to happen to my child!") There are so many "ghosts in the classroom," alive in these encounters. Yet one of the wise teachers sees the parent-teacher conference as "a haven in a heartless world," which Lightfoot calls "an asylum where the dialogue can be more open and exploratory, a process of mutual discovery."

Lawrence-Lightfoot is so evocative in her commitment to Stories. It's another way of writing that "paints portraits," in which she is so gifted. The stories abounding in The Essential Conversation speaks piercingly to us, from the author's awareness as researcher, as writer/scholar with a huge perspective, and as person with a keen and compassionate ear. We walk with her through the mine fields and breakthroughs, among the alliances and enmities and new connections, intense fears and fervent hopes. And the Stories propel us forward to Lawrence-Lightfoot's urgent plea for awareness, training, practice, commitment to making these encounters far, far better.

Ultimately, amid all the portrayals of many different kinds of emotionally tumultuous encounters, there is Lawrence-Lightfoot's commitment to our learning from "examining examples of 'goodness,'" rather than from obsession with "dissecting weakness and pathology."

There is high drama in this book, and great wisdom, and a soaring, generous intelligence that heartens and inspires.