Parent Engagement—The Imperative!

This chapter describes the international and Australian contexts for the Principal Leadership for Parent Engagement research featured in this book. We shine a light on the imperative of parent engagement and define the key terms: “parent”, “wellbeing”, and “parent engagement”. Next we introduce the idea of “agency” by describing how Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) triadic view of agency as comprising iterational (past), projective (future), and practical-evaluative dimensions in combination with Biesta and Tedder’s (2007) notion of agency as achievement were used to understand the findings of the Principal Leadership for Parent Engagement project.