Week 9 discussion

I really enjoyed and appreciated reading “Parents as Learning Partners…” as it directly relates to our design project around parent engagement. It hadn’t occurred to me that there might be multiple types of roles parents can play in supporting learning at home. I wonder how intentional the parents in this study were in performing a specific role, or if it just came naturally to them. One of the challenges we see in our design project is how difficult it is to inform parents of the benefits of their role in their child’s learning (ie – benefits of co-viewing). There are limited forums to deliver that message.

While reading this, I also couldn’t help but think about the disparities between these families and those in lower SES or culturally diverse families. In one section, the study describes not only are there knowledge and SEL payoffs to learning this stuff early, there are other developments such as new roles in the community, invitation to apprenticeship, etc. It’s as if opportunities beget more opportunities. So how are we to expect families who aren’t in the right neighborhoods or backgrounds to get into the game? It re-affirms for me the need for investment in areas such as mentoring programs and social networks where students can draw motivation and information from others if they cannot get that from their parents.

I’m also struck by the important of parent experience to help students persist through challenging periods of learning by drawing on their own experiences. However, we know most parents won’t have those experiences to draw from. One opportunity that I see might be to consider how the child might teach parents. If I recall from the Teachable Agent work, students learn better when they know they are going to be teaching it to someone else. What if that someone was a parent? Perhaps it just takes reframing the problem to see the opportunity in front of us building more ways for children to teach parents on the new technologies and skills they’re exposed to at school and in life.