“Failure of the Home to Function Properly,”: Visiting Teachers, Caregivers, and the Intersection of Social Work, Schooling, and Social Control

Background/Purpose: During the Progressive Era, the Visiting Teachers Movement (VTM) emerged from a confluence of forces, including compulsory education laws, concerns about immigration, and competing clinical and ecological models arising from the burgeoning social work profession. As precursors to contemporary school social workers, visiting teacher straddled both education and social work, inheriting the possibilities and pitfalls of both professions. Specifically, associations of power—which operate in both professions—shaped visiting teachers’ professional status and their interactions with others. Drawing on Foucoult’s (1977) framework of disciplinary power, this study examines how interactions between visiting teachers and caregivers —as described in case records and reports produced at the time— shaped discourse around caregiving behaviors, while reflecting the core values and tensions of the VTM. The dynamics between visiting teachers and caregivers have clear implications to contemporary challenges concerning parental school engagement, parents’ distrust in schools, and debates over parental rights in human service delivery.

Methods: This study uses a critical discourse analysis of archival case records and reports produced by the VTMbetween 1916 and 1929. The study primarily draws on case records by visiting teachers, published in books, reports, and essays that sought to document and justify the VTM as a new profession. Throughout the process, I focus on why and how the specific discourses, knowledge, and practices of caregiving were communicated, and normalized by the VTM.

Findings: This paper argues that visiting teachers exhibited disciplinary power over caregivers through defining and enforcing the standards and expectations of proper parenting. Visiting teachers, who almost universally embodied the values and identities of “native-born” white, educated, middle-class women, often encountered families from less privileged backgrounds, which subsequently influenced their perceptions and interactions. In the tradition of social diagnosis, visiting teachers frequently attributed children’s issues to caregiver dysfunction and sought to rectify this dysfunction through improving caregiver’s attitudes and behaviors. Additionally, interactions with caregivers furthered the VTM’s goals of Americanization— or compulsory cultural assimilation directed towards predominately white European immigrants —social hygiene, and Protestant morality. In instances where caregivers were clearly in defiance ofthese values, visiting teachers took more extreme measures, such as facilitating the child’s removal from the household.

Conclusion/Implications: While the VTM contributed to contemporary understandings of holistic child development, it also led to unprecedented state access to— and surveillance of —caregivers’ and children’s homes. This adverse outcome of the VTM has not been thoroughly reckoned with and has clear implications for contemporary school social work practice and the dynamics between caregivers and schools. Despite the widespread acknowledgement of the critical role of parental support in achieving positive outcomes, both education and social work have historically struggled in establishing trust between professionals and caregivers. As this study explains, sources of mistrust often stem from perceived power imbalances between staff and parents, as well as concerns that schoolstaff may hold and act on negative stereotypes related to socioeconomic status or racial identity. In addition to reifying these concerns, this study calls for strengths-based approaches for equitable parental school engagement.