The Parenting Actor-Network of Latino Immigrants in the United States

Parental Facilitation of Young Children's Technology-based Learning Experiences from Nondominant Groups During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Importantly, low-SES Latinx parents see the benefits of media and technologies can bring into their children's education and therefore exercise various facilitation practices. These practices include [25,32,39,58]: learning new skills and exploring new media resources for kids, e.g., looking up instructional videos on YouTube for self-education with the aim to support children's academic tasks; learning together with children, such as co-reading e-books, competing with each other in learning new English words, and searching information together; scaffolding children's learning with media like encouraging children to create their own media projects and suggesting activity ideas; and answering children's questions and teaching children new media skills. Additionally, for many low-SES Latinx parents who speak little English, this language barrier is a significant challenge in participating in their children's academic tasks [63].…”

“…Low-SES parents also use significantly less online resources or social network sites to support their children's education [8]. Additionally, Latinx parents may feel insecure about information from actors they are unfamiliar with, e.g., online sources, and are more likely than White parents to distrust information that is not from authoritative venues like teachers [8,10,58]. These significant gaps in device access and media resources suggest the media forms and content accessed by low-SES young people differ from their middle-class counterparts, such as the significant amount of television time in the daily lives of Latinx young people [10].…”

“…As a result, online schooling remained the only technology-based learning opportunity for some children. Knowing that nondominant parents are more likely to rely on teachers as their primary source of information for formal and informal learning [43], schools and teachers can play an essential role to bridge these gaps in learning opportunities for children from nondominant groups by sharing learning resources available on various media with parents and children, such as free videos, educational apps, and events that are relevant to school learning and accessible through basic devices like television and smartphones [57,58]. Similarly, community-based learning spaces and organizations like libraries and museums can also include such learning opportunities and resources in their handouts or newsletters to their audience families.…”

“…The comparison shows that nondominant parents were already exercising many of the facilitation practices we identified during the pandemic for their children's learning and technology use before the pandemic. These practices include (1) finding educational resources and brokering learning opportunities for children, such as searching learning resources for children's homework online or through their own network [8,32,58]; (2) encouraging and scaffolding children's learning activities, e.g., suggesting project ideas for children and encouraging creative media creation [8,32]; (3) teaching children academic knowledge and technical skills, e.g., providing instructions on homework and photography skills [25,32]; (4) co-learning and co-engaging with media technologies, e.g., collectively searching information and reading e-books together [8,32,39]; as well as ( 5) managing children's learning and interaction with technologies, such as checking children's schoolwork progress and limiting device access [8,25,44]. Such similarities suggest that nondominant parents continued their daily facilitation practices for children's learning into the pandemic.…”

“…The contributions of this paper are threefold: First, our study provides a qualitative description of children's technology-based learning experiences from parents' perspectives during an emergent crisis, particularly from low socioeconomic status (SES) families, a population group that has received increasing attention from HCI and CSCW researchers recently, e.g., [39,56,58]. These empirical findings are valuable for educational practitioners and technology designers to discover new learning opportunities for children with limited resources, and to design more accessible and productive learning experiences and technologies that will continue to be relevant even in the post-pandemic landscape.…”