Mapping knowledge transfer in early childhood education and care in South Africa

This pilot study explores through participative methods the implicit models, situated understandings and processes of early childhood care and education in South Africa in the context of poverty. The intention is to expose and reconcile potential tensions between ‘official’ Western and classed child-rearing practices and indigenous beliefs and realities of poor communities in KwaZulu-Natal

THE ROLE OF FAMILY ENVIRONMENT IN DISTANCE LEARNING

This paper aims to discuss the role of family environment in distance learning. It presents the research conducted regarding parents’ views on distance learning, the way they experience it, the obstacles and the assets that are associated with distance learning. School-family collaborative relations are regarded crucial in enhancing students’ learning experience. Parents can contribute to their children’s learning by cultivating a positive relationship with their children, providing advice and guidance, organizing time, recording, and encouraging participation (motivation), teaching with the aim of supporting children. Parents can also supervise the completion of tasks and seek help when needed, time management, identifying students' needs, communication, and access to useful resources. It is important that parents understand the essential role that children play online. Parents need to be trained to organize their children's time, motivate students, and provide them with learning support when needed and make sure their child is learning. Finally, recommendations are presented about supporting students’ online learning by their parents.  Article visualizations

Greater Power, Lasting Impact: Effective Grantmaker Strategies from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

CPER (also referred to here on as the "Fund") is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. CPER originated in discussions among funders active in Grantmakers for Education's Working Group on Education Organizing.They launched the collaborative in 2007, in partnership with NEO Philanthropy (then Public Interest Projects), the 501 (c)(3) public charity engaged to direct the Fund. CPER's founding funders saw that, in the education debates of the day, the perspectives of those closest to the ground were often left out. These funders recognized that students and families have a crucial role to play in identifying, embracing, and sustaining meaningful school reform. Students and families know their own needs and see first-hand the inequities in schools. Organizing groups help them get a seat at the decision-making table and develop workable solutions, building on community assets that are vital to addressing the cultural and political dimensions of reform. These grassroots groups are essential to creating the public accountability and will needed to catalyze educational reforms and ensure they stick. They can be the antidote to the ever-shifting political conditions and leadership turnover that plague reform efforts. At the same time, they help community members develop leadership and a grassroots base, building individual civic capacity and community power that strengthens our democratic infrastructure for the long term. Because educational improvement requires tackling persistent inequities in race and income, supporting leaders in low-income communities of color also helps build the social capital needed to solve integrally related social challenges. CPER was initially conceived to run for a minimum of three years -- a timeline consistent with most foundation grants but short for the transformative kinds of changes the Fund hoped to achieve. CPER's lifespan eventually stretched to eight years because of the recognized power of its supported work. Over this period, NEO Philanthropy engaged a highly diverse set of 76 local and national funders in the CPER collaborative. Incentivizing new resources through matching dollars, CPER raised close to $34 million and invested nationally in some 140 community groups and advocacy allies in national coalitions and in six target sites of varying scale (California, Chicago, Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Philadelphia). These groups, in turn, developed local leadership, national coalitions, and cross-issue alliances that helped to achieve over 90 school-, district, and state-level policy reforms that strengthen educational equity and opportunity. CPER's history of impact illustrates the efficacy of community organizing as an essential education reform strategy, along with the more commonly supported strategies of policy advocacy, research, and model demonstration efforts. But CPER's story is also more broadly instructive. In this period of "strategic philanthropy " when focused, foundation-led agendas are increasingly seen as the surest route to achieving desired ends, CPER offered a very different, bottom-up, multi-issue alternative that proved effective. In sharing CPER's story, we hope to deepen understanding of the value of community organizing for education reform while contributing to the larger conversation about how grantmakers can effectively support social movements to strengthen opportunity and justice

Interactional theory of childhood problematic media use

The growth of mobile device access and ownership has yielded many opportunities and challenges for raising healthy digital media consumers. As adoption of mobile and internet‐connected devices has increased among children, concerns for healthy child development have been expressed regarding excessive or problematic use. Although much theoretical and empirical work has been conducted evaluating adolescents’ and adults’ risks for dependence on various screen media (e.g., Gaming Disorder, Internet Addiction), little theoretical consideration has been expounded regarding the etiology and maintenance of problematic media use earlier in childhood (i.e., under age 12 years). The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework through which to investigate problematic media use in early childhood. Our theory, the Interactional Theory of Childhood Problematic Media Use (IT‐CPU) merges developmental and clinical psychology theories, with communication and human‐computer interaction perspectives. We outline distal and proximal factors that we hypothesize contribute to the development of problematic media use in childhood, and emphasize maintaining factors that could be targets for intervention. Finally, we provide recommendations for an interdisciplinary research agenda to test our proposed theory and inform experimental trials to prevent and treat childhood problematic media use.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163470/2/hbe2217_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163470/1/hbe2217.pd

FROM NEEDS TO STRENGTHS: DEVISING ASSETS-BASED PARENT-EDUCATION ICTS FOR LATINX/A/O IMMIGRANT PARENTS IN THE UNITED STATES

Immigration to higher-income countries such as the United States (U.S.) is a worldwide, growing phenomenon. As the number of people moving across the world increases, so does the number of children of immigrants needing support to succeed academically. While a growing number of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer parent-education support, these rarely respond to the complex reality of parents from nondominant backgrounds, such as immigrants. When ICTs cater to these groups, they tend to do this via patches to help these parents catch up with mainstream society. By disregarding immigrant parents' strengths and capacities—or assets—to contribute solutions to their own problems, most parent-education ICTs end up perpetuating information inequities. In response, my dissertation works with low-income, Spanish-speaking Latinx/a/o immigrant parents to explore design pathways for parent-education ICTs to better respond to parents from nondominant groups. I approach this problem through an assets-based approach to design, which fosters technology-supported transformations that build on and amplify users' strengths. Through ethnographic fieldwork and Participatory Design (PD) engagements, this dissertation offers two contributions to existing Human-Computer Interaction research on the role of technology in learning, education, and families. First, it contributes a holistic understanding of how information channels in the educational system operate as assets for parents. Second, it proposes assets-based design pathways for parent-education ICTs to support Latinx/a/o immigrant parents. This research also contributes to HCI's growing interest in an assets-based design process by advancing analytical approaches and methodological considerations for working with assets in a large-scale system. These contributions can significantly inform critical transformations for technology in educational systems and illuminate a design process that supports vulnerable groups in attaining sustainable, emancipatory changes.Ph.D

The construction of (good) parents (as professionals) in/through learning platforms

The increasing platformization of contemporary education is reshaping schooling in a multitude of ways, including the relationship parents have with their children’s education. While a growing number of research is revealing the influential impacts platforms have on various educational professions, few scholars have so far looked at how parents are designed, made visible and normatively regulated (e.g., as being/becoming professional) in/through specific platforms, also because associating parents with educational professionality seems much less self-evident than for groups such as teachers or principals. As we argue in this contribution, drawing on ongoing discussions from the field of parenthood, studies offers fruitful inspiration to not only better understand what parental (educational) professionalization means, but equally how it can be brought together with research on parental platformization. Building on that literature framework, we then illuminate what we see when employing such an approach empirically, using two distinct learning platforms as case studies – ClassDojo, a classroom and behavior management platform used mainly in anglophone countries, and Antolin, a reading enhancement platform used in German schools. Drawing on the initial findings from both case studies, we conclude with a suggested research agenda around ‘platformized parents’ and offer a framework of questions to guide its advancement. (DIPF/Orig.

Parental Participation in the Education of Female Students with Learning Difficulties: The Views of Saudi Elementary Teachers and Parents.

This study contributes to knowledge of parental involvement in education in Saudi Arabia by focusing on teachers’ and parents’ conceptualisations, attitudes and practices of parental involvement in the education of female students with learning difficulties in elementary inclusive schools. The specific location of the research is Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia. Three specific objectives informed the research: (1) to obtain teachers’ and parents’ views on their conceptualisations and current practices of parent involvement, (2) to document and analyse teachers’ and parents’ views about the importance of parental involvement, roles, and responsibilities, and (3) to identify the obstacles to implementing effective parental involvement practices. In this study, I used Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological system theory to provide a framework for the development of the questionnaire, data collection, analysis, and discussion. Based on the pragmatic research paradigm, I utilised a mixed-methods design with a purposive sampling strategy to collect data from 110 teachers and 105 parents. The particular design chosen for this study was a sequential explanatory type which is also referred to as the QUAN-qual research model or the explanatory mixed-method design. The research approach involved the collection and analysis of survey data followed by the collection and analysis of interview data for integration. A close-ended questionnaire and a semi-structured interview for teachers and parents were employed to collect data. At the interview stage, 10 parents and 10 teachers from those who responded to the questionnaire were interviewed. The survey data were transferred from the hard copy material into SPSS version 26. The data analyses included descriptive statistic of mean, standard deviations and rankings of mean scores. In addition, factor analysis, t-test, and ANOVA were performed to test the cluster of responses and variabilities in the results pertaining to teachers and parents. Further, framework analysis serves as a pragmatic approach to the analysis of the interview data. The results indicated that parental involvement conceptualisation varied among participants. Key among their conceptualisations were: the connection between the members of the school’s community; the activities that teachers and parents participate in together; a two-way communication that helps to improve the education of students; and a contractual agreement between teachers and parents that involved trust, respectful relationship, and positive cooperation. In terms of parental involvement practices, almost all the teachers indicated that they did not involve parents in making decisions about their children’s education. More than half of the teachers indicated that they communicated to parents regularly to provide information about their children’s education. However, parents contend that teachers only communicated to them about their children’s academic problems and behavioural challenges. Regarding the availability of school-level policy on parental involvement, most teachers and parents agreed these policies did not exist. In the absence of policy to guide teachers, parental involvement practice was arbitrary, demonstrating a dissonance in practice. However, parents’ support for their daughters’ learning at home achieved the highest mean score. A major concern of parents was that school meetings were organised without consulting them which may implicate some barriers to parents’ involvement, but teachers claimed that parents’ attitudes reduced their interest in working with them. Further, some teachers alluded that their school responsibilities and lack of time made it impossible for them to involve parents. The majority of teachers affirmed that training them on how to work with parents might improve parental involvement. All parents claimed that positive and effective communication that incorporates respectful relationships can improve their relationships with teachers to participate in the education of their children with learning difficulties in inclusive elementary schools in Saudi Arabia. Based on these findings, I provided recommendations that may help in developing a contextually relevant parental involvement practice in Saudi Arabia