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Design Guidelines for Parent-School Technologies to
Support the Ecology of Parental Engagement
Marisol Wong-Villacres ∗
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Atlanta, USA
lvillacr@gatech.edu
Escuela Superior
Politecnica del Litoral
Guayaquil, Ecuador
lvillacr@espol.edu.ec
Upol Ehsan ∗
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Atlanta, USA
ehsanu@gatech.edu
Amber Solomon
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Atlanta, USA
asolomon30@gatech.edu
Mercedes Pozo Buil
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Atlanta, USA
mercedes.pozo@eas.gatech.edu
Betsy DiSalvo
Georgia Institute of
Technology
Atlanta, USA
bdisalvo@cc.gatech.edu
ABSTRACT
Parents’ engagement in their children’s education is key to chil-
dren’s academic success and social development. For many
parents in the U.S., engagement is still a struggle partly due
to a lack of communication and community-building tools
that support the broader ecology of parenting, or parental
ecology. Although current technologies have the potential to
create opportunities to improve parental engagement, little is
known about the impact of existing technology’s design on
the parental ecology. We present findings from 63 interviews
with parents and an observation of existing technologies that
support parent-school interactions. We found four critical is-
sues that the design of current technologies need to address:
(1) inflexibility in the boundaries of digital spaces, (2) inequal-
ity, (3) fragmentation and inconsistency of information, and
(4) lack of relevant non-academic information. As a result,
we propose design guidelines for technologies to support the
parental ecology, and reflect on design issues that require
further research.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces: Computer-
supported cooperative work
Author Keywords
Social Network; Parental Engagement; Schools and Teachers;
Community Building; Meaningful Interactions
*Both authors equally contributed to this work
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to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.
IDC ’17, June 27-30, 2017, Stanford, CA, USA
© 2017 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4921-5/17/06.. .$15.00
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3078072.3079748
INTRODUCTION
Parental engagement in their children’s education is key to
the academic success and social development of their children
[3, 6, 16]. However, for many parents in the United States,
this engagement is challenging [26, 23, 15] in part because of
a lack of communication and community-building tools that
support the broader ecology of parenting [24, 11]. We refer
to the broader ecology of parenting, or parental ecology, as
the many influences on how one acts as a parent [7, 1, 5]. Our
focus is to understand how digital technologies can support the
parental ecology so as to augment opportunities for children
to reach educational outcomes.
Schools have traditionally provided some digital communi-
cation tools, but these tools have been limited to supporting
official interactions with parents, such as electronic grade re-
ports, digital newsletters, and websites or parent portals where
teachers post information [15, 8, 19]. This traditional commu-
nication tends to disenfranchise parents’ ability to act outside
school-created channels of communication. In addition, it ig-
nores the engagement that happens between parents or others
in the community (e.g., other parents or their children’s former
teachers) [15, 21]. Previous research suggests that parents
have been leveraging other information technology tools to
connect and interact in meaningful ways with other individuals
in the parenting ecology [9]. These tools enable parents to cre-
ate and maintain spaces in their parenting ecology, where they
can communicate with other parents. However, we argue that
these tools do not provide every parent the same opportunity
to contribute their voice equitably and influence the ecology.
Regardless, technology can be a way to support more acces-
sible, meaningful, and equitable communication to improve
parental engagement. It can also open new channels of com-
munication with schools, teachers, and other parents [13, 25].
However, there have been few studies exploring how parent-
school communication technologies support community en-
gagement [14] and how should be designed to support the
parental ecology [29, 28].
To address these issues, we expand existing work on parents
and technology by studying technologies’ ability to facilitate
meaningful interactions in the parental ecology. Based on
the work of Hughes et al. [17], we define meaningful inter-
actions as the communicative activities in which all parties
can express their experiences and interests, and make sense
of others’ expressions in terms of their own particular pur-
poses and agendas. To better understand the structures and
resources that support the interactions amongst members of
the ecology, we use the concept of space described by Barton
et al. [1]. They define a space as a setting in which people
come together to pursuit desirable outcomes. Looking at the
digital and non-digital spaces of the parenting ecology allows
us to identify social norms for participating in those spaces,
the tools they use to support the shared participation, and the
types of interactions the spaces support.
In this paper, we present the findings from 63 interviews with
parents as well as observations of parents and schools/teachers
interactions in existing digital spaces. This study focuses
on parents as a response to parents’ lack of voice in the ex-
isting communications technologies hosted by schools. We
recognize that teachers and schools may have different needs
and agendas for communications and are important actors in
the parenting ecology. However, our findings and previous
research suggest that existing technologies do not support
meaningful interactions amongst individuals of the parenting
ecology. Instead, these technologies tend to reinforce power
and equity issues between schools and parents, as well as
amongst parents.
We contribute in three ways to the growing body of research
on the design of parent-school communication technologies.
First, we examine existing parent-school communication tech-
nologies beyond the operational issues of their integration in
schools and homes. We provide a rich description of the issues
and opportunities of improvement in these technologies in
terms of parental engagement within the parenting ecology.
Second, drawing from our findings and inspired by previous
work on parents, technology, and education [9, 2], we derive
design guidelines for digital interaction spaces that support
parents’ engagement with their children’s education. Third,
we identify a research agenda for the creation of such digital
interaction spaces.
We begin this paper by reviewing previous research on the
notion of parental engagement and the impact of technology
in parent-school relationships. Next, we describe the methods
and findings from our study, focusing on the role of technolo-
gies in supporting spaces of interaction within a parenting
ecology. Finally, we conclude by proposing design guidelines
for interaction spaces and reflect on design issues that require
further research such as privacy and community management.
RELATED WORK
In this section we provide a rationale for focusing on parental
engagement instead of the traditional concept of parental in-
volvement. We then explain the relevance of meaningful in-
teractions for the parenting ecology. Finally, we establish
differences between our work and previous work on technol-
ogy and parental engagement.
From Parental Involvement to Parental Engagement
Educational research has traditionally used the term parental
involvement to define activities and ways for parents to interact
with the school environment [16, 12, 3]. These activities are
determined to be extremely relevant to the growth and devel-
opment of children [27, 16, 12]. However, the term parental
involvement does not adequately portray the dynamic nature of
parents’ participation in schools [1, 7]. Thus, in our study we
chose to use the term engagement as defined by Barton et al.’s
[1]. They conceptualize parental engagement as the dynamic,
distributed, and interactive process that parents go through to
navigate barriers between home and school. They propose
parental engagement as a relational phenomenon among par-
ents, teachers, and communities framed by the spaces in which
the engagement happens. Such spaces are the underlying struc-
tures and resources where parents can engage in meaningful
exchanges to establish their presence at school and influence
it in nontraditional and informal ways.
Exploring technology-mediated parent-school interactions
through the lens of engagement enables us to move beyond
describing how parents use or complain about technologies
imposed by schools. Furthermore, it allows us to identify gaps
and opportunities in existing technologies to foster the creation
of spaces where parents can interact in the parental ecology.
Meaningful Interactions
Interactions amongst parents and schools is an issue of con-
cern for educational researchers. Parent-school interactions
entail mostly the delivery of school-directed information (e.g.,
parent-teacher conferences where teachers inform parents
about their child’s progress and activities, an email with a
newsletter, etc.) [11]. However, these restricted types of ex-
changes tend to hinder parental agency to impact the school
environment [15, 21, 17]. Teachers tend to interact with par-
ents as if they are visitors [20]. Thus, feeling unwelcomed,
parents tend to perceive that their interests and ideas for im-
provement are not considered valuable.
For these reasons, many researchers have argued that parent-
school interactions need to go beyond the exchange of de-
personalized information, and instead, focus on building real
connections between all individuals of the parenting ecology
and be meaningful for all parties [15, 2, 17, 14]. These interac-
tions need to be meaningful for all parties [17, 14]. Meaning-
ful interactions enable all parties to represent their practices
(e.g., home practices, school practices, teacher’s and parents’
practices) and interests to impact the schooling environment.
Moreover, meaningful interactions allow participants to inter-
pret others’ shared information in terms of their own particular
purposes and agendas. To better understand technology’s role
in the parent-school relationship, we analyze parent-school
physical and digital interactions through the lens of meaning-
ful interactions.
Parental Engagement and Technology Use
Research on the role of technology in parental engagement
has mostly focused on assessing parents’ and teachers’ percep-
tions of how useful technologies are. For example, previous
work has established that parents perceive parent portals and
electronic progress to be useful for being more aware of their
children’s academic performance [10, 8]. Nelms [22] found
that many parents appreciate email-based communication and
feel that technology allows them to ask questions and voice
concerns. Grujanac [15] demonstrated that schools and teach-
ers tend to resist operational procedures introduced by new
technology due to lack of adequate training or support to inte-
grate these practices into their routines .
Unlike existing research, our study focuses on identifying and
studying the spaces for parental engagement that existing tech-
nologies are fostering. Our approach attempts to inform the
design of new technologies that foster equitable partnerships
between schools and parents.
Parental Engagement and Technology Design
In regards to HCI-related research, parents in children’s edu-
cation are an emergent audience. Research on the topic has
proposed the use of existing/new technologies such as video-
tapes [17], online forums [2], social networking sites [29],
and learning suites [28] to help parents, teachers, and children
participate in school-based activities. However, no previous
studies have focused on the design of parent-school technolo-
gies to support parental engagement from a community-based,
ecological perspective.
Although prior research has provided some design implica-
tions, it has not focused on supporting the parental ecology.
For example, work on parents’ practices when seeking educa-
tional information for their children [9, 18] suggested parent-
school communication technology should allow both parents
and teachers to have an impact at school, consider parents’
reading and writing levels, and facilitate parent-led initiatives
rather than school-authored ones as the only way of communi-
cation.
We extend HCI-related research on technology design for
parental engagement by providing detailed design guidelines
for a digital interaction space that supports equitable voices
in the parental ecology. Our goal is to harness technology’s
potential to strengthen social systems related to parenting and
education.
METHODS
To understand the impact of existing parent-school technol-
ogy’s design aspects on the parental ecology, we analyzed
interviews with parents on the technology they use to commu-
nicate with schools and stay informed on their child’s progress
and observed parents using existing parent-school related tech-
nologies.
Parent Interviews
We analyzed 63 semi-structured interviews conducted with
parents in the U.S. to understand the types of parent-school
interactions that communication technologies currently sup-
port. These interviews were from a larger study about parents’
strategies for finding learning opportunities for their children
[9].
Interviews included questions on the relationship between
parents and teachers and the technologies they use to commu-
nicate. Participants were from three different audiences: 28
parents were from a low socioeconomic status (SES) from a
southern U.S. urban area, 15 parents were from a high-SES in
small towns and rural areas in the Midwest of the U.S., and
20 parents were from a high SES in suburban and urban areas
across the U.S., mainly concentrated in the southeast. The age
of participants’ children varied from one to eighteen years old.
Technology Observations
In addition to the 63 interviews, we reached out to 9 parents
and 2 teachers from various backgrounds to understand tech-
nology’s role in supporting parents’ creation of online commu-
nication spaces. We asked these informants to direct us to the
current technologies parents and schools use to interact with
each other (e.g., Class Dojo, email, Facebook pages/groups,
etc.). We observed one informant using technologies that re-
quire private access such as school email, Class Dojo, and
closed groups of parents on Facebook. We also interacted
with publicly available technologies (school Facebook pages,
schools’ websites, and teachers’ blogs). We took detailed
notes of the content managed in these tools, as well as on the
existing online interactions taking place.
Data Analysis
Interviews were transcribed, and participants’ names were
anonymized and replaced with pseudonyms. Using the tran-
scripts and the notes taken during our observations of the
technologies, we conducted an inductive approach to data
analysis, grounded in coding techniques. We generated a set
of codes that described patterns related to technology support
for spaces of interaction and meaningful interactions. Then,
an iterative analytic process allowed us to generate themes that
were reduced over time and that led to the findings we present
in this paper.
FINDINGS
We organize our findings based on the concept of spaces within
the parenting ecology. This focus on spaces allowed us to
identify the underlying structures and resources available for
parents to engage in meaningful interactions and establish
their presence in schools. In this section, we first define the
spaces we identified from our investigations. Then, we provide
a review of existing parent-school technologies in terms of
their role in parents’ creation and maintenance of interaction
spaces. Last, we describe the issues and opportunities existing
technologies entail for supporting the parental ecology.
Interaction Spaces
Based on our findings, we extend Barton et al.’s work [1] and
propose a new categorization of spaces based on the ownership
of the space. We identify two types of spaces where parents
can interact in meaningful ways: formal and informal.Formal
spaces are owned by a school or a school endorsed organi-
zation, like the Parent Teacher Association (PTA). Informal
spaces are owned by parents, e.g., parents informal meetings
with teachers when they are picking up their children from
school, and parent groups on Facebook.
Our findings also show that spaces can be characterized by
interactions both in the physical and digital world. Sometimes
digital interactions help maintain spaces in the physical-world.
For example, the exchange of text messages and emails be-
tween parents and teachers informs parent-teacher informal
conversations during pick-up time. Other times, spaces are
created and maintained by almost-only digital interactions.
This is the case of school’s Facebook pages and websites.
Formal Spaces
Both interviews and our observations of digital environments
show that most parent-school interactions in formal spaces
(e.g., the classroom, science nights, and school’s Facebook
page) involve the exchange of school-directed information
only. These findings are in line with previous work, which
found schools often define the terms of home-school relation-
ship [17, 14].
When meaningful interactions occur in formal spaces, it is
often the result of two communication mechanisms. The first
mechanism is actualized by parents’ efforts to connect with
a member of the school (e.g., a teacher) and to construct a
close relationship with that member. For that purpose, parents
and teachers use mostly face-to-face interactions supported by
personal communication technologies, such as SMS, email,
and cellphone calls. Most parents explained this constant
communication allows them to have more agency in the com-
munication.
The second mechanism entails school’s and teachers’ efforts
to suggest information (e.g., about extra curricular activities)
instead of imposing it (e.g., progress reports or calls for manda-
tory school events). In our interviews, parents mentioned they
utilized these opportunities to help their children explore new
learning experiences according to both their, and their chil-
dren’s purpose.
Informal Spaces
Informal spaces are spaces created by parents inside or outside
formal spaces. Many parents shared their stories of creating
informal spaces within the school by consistently interacting
with teachers or other school actors. In addition, many parents
attempt to participate in spaces for meaningful interactions
with other parents and teachers outside the school (e.g., cell
phone conversations, WhatsApp and Facebook groups). In
these spaces, parental voices can flourish– parents can ex-
press themselves without potential judgment from teachers or
school-based moderators. Parents with access to such spaces
are more empowered to make decisions about their child’s aca-
demic life. For example, Carolina shared how she harnesses
these informal spaces to support her daughter’s academic suc-
cess.
“Then when she [Mia, Carolina’s daughter] adds the AP
classes into it, it will be interesting to see how that all
kind of plays out. A lot of my friends at church have kids
that have already gone through high school, or not gone
all the way through but have kids higher than what Mia
is. I call them up and say, ’OK. Now what do we do?’
Or even just asking about teachers. I mean your child
is going to have that teacher but sometimes it’s nice to
know: Is it a hard teacher? What are the quirks of this
teacher? So that you can kind of prepare her to kind of
work around.” [Carolina, mother of a high-schooler]
Many parents also described how they capitalize their use of
social media, such as Facebook and WhatsApp, to participate
in parent-to-parent informal spaces. For example, Renata
told us how she used Facebook as an informal space to gain
perspectives from other parents’ opinions.
“ I would go on Facebook and post something and see
what my friends who have kids the same age might rec-
ommend. Yeah. If there’s something ...say, ’Hey. My kid
needs extra help in history. What do you know that’s out
there’ then I might type something and then with how
Facebook works in 30 minutes you’ve got 10 different
ideas come in at you.” [Renata, mother of a middle-
schooler]
Parents’ accounts on their participation in informal spaces
for parent-to-parent interactions strongly suggest these spaces
are key for a successful engagement. Next, we describe the
current parent-school communication technologies in terms
of their role in the creation and maintenance of formal and
informal spaces of interaction.
Technologies and Interaction Spaces
In this section, we describe the technologies parent and schools
are using to communicate. We have grouped these technolo-
gies in the following categories: technologies for classroom
management, technologies for community-building, and tech-
nologies for personal communications. In contrast to previous
work on technology and parental engagement, our descriptions
of these technologies focus on the support they provide to the
creation of interaction spaces.
Technology for Classroom Management
Classroom management technologies allow schools to create
digital formal spaces. Schools use these technologies to in-
form parents on their child’s academic progress or behavior.
For example, Class Dojo is a cross-platform application for
community-building where teachers post photos or videos of
moments in the classroom to help parents stay informed on
what their child did in class. Parents can also instant message
teachers, but not to other parents. Other technologies for class-
room management include customized versions of "parent
portals" offered by various school districts and schools . These
are web-based applications where teachers can post students’
grades for parents to see and send messages to parents. Al-
though these technologies allow for parents to communicate
with individual teachers, most interviewed parents indicated
they would rather use personal technologies such as email and
SMS to support their interactions with teachers.
Technology for Community Building
Both interviews and technology observations demonstrated
schools and school-related organizations use social media
sites to create formal spaces. Likewise, these technologies are
being used by parents to create informal spaces where they
can interact with other parents and teachers.
From our observation of school-related digital technology we
learned that schools use their Facebook pages as formal spaces
for broadcasting school-related information (e.g., events or
general weather advice to parents). On Facebook pages, par-
ents can post, but the school ultimately decides what content
stays. Organizations associated with the school, like the PTA,
often create their own Facebook groups. Schools also use Twit-
ter to communicate with parents on more urgent matters, like a
late bus arrival. In addition, many schools ask their teachers to
post all classroom related information on school-hosted blogs.
Our interviews, as well as our observations showed how many
parents use social tools to self-organize into informal commu-
nities with other parents and teachers. Miranda, for example,
shared how useful a "Mom’s Google group" was to her.
“A lot of the moms in the class, we’re on a Google Group,
so we’ll all email each other when there’s different events
coming up, or when there’s an educational thing that
we want to bring to the school.” [Miranda, mother of a
pre-schooler]
We observed that in these spaces parents can share information
that represents their interests and experiences, like questions
on child-rearing, or children-related social events outside of
the school.
Technology for Personal Communication
As a whole, the data we collected highlighted that parents
and schools use technologies such as emails, text messages,
and phone calls to foster different types of spaces. These
technologies support parents’ efforts to create informal spaces
within the schooling environment. On the other hand, schools
use such technologies to extend their formal spaces outside
the school boundaries.
Many parents we interviewed frequently strove to construct
strong relationships with school actors, which include teachers
and administration staff. These relationships allowed them
to create informal spaces of interaction that afford a two-way
communication in which parents felt they could influence life
in schools. To foster these spaces parents still preferred using
opportunities for face-to-face interaction such as stopping by
the school, visiting the class, showing up to conferences, and
even volunteering to help in class. However, our interviews
highlight that communication through personal technologies
such as email, text messages, and phone calls are key in help-
ing parents pave the way for creating and maintaining those
informal spaces. Tamara, explains how she depends on these
technologies to develop a sense of closeness with her daugh-
ters’ teachers.
“All of her teachers, I develop close relationships with
them. I even have their cell phone numbers. We email
sometimes. I might just stop up to the school to visit the
class or check in on her. But a lot of times if I can’t get
them at the school I always try email first. But I ask them
if they don’t mind me having their cell phone number, and
most of them never mind. So, yeah. I have a lot of access
to her teachers.” [Tamara, mother of a middle-schooler]
In addition, parents, such as Pablo and his wife, use these
technologies to activate informal spaces of interaction with
other parents.
“What will happen generally is we don’t email her
friends’ parents a lot, but let’s say we hear something
from our daughter about a camp that one of her friends
went through, we may either wait until we see that parent
and talk to them about it or we send them an email. So
technology does facilitate that and like I said, I bet my
wife emails and stuff more than I know, because she won’t
copy me on things like that, but she uses word of mouth
but she also uses texting and emailing to ask.” [Pablo,
father of a middle-schooler]
Our observation of existing technology shows that schools and
teachers also use personal technologies, but their purpose is to
strengthen the presence and outreach of existing textitformal
spaces. For example, teachers use email to inform parents
about their child’s in-class activities and progress. Schools
often use text messages, phone calls, and emails to send mass
messages to every parent. Mass messages are read-only and
do not allow replies.
Issues to Further Explore
Our analysis of existing technologies revealed four critical
issues that the design of current digital tools needs to address:
(1) inflexibility in the boundaries of digital spaces, (2) inequal-
ity, (3) fragmentation and inconsistency of information, and
(4) lack of relevant non-academic information. In this section,
we discuss these issues in detail.
Inflexible Boundaries of Digital Spaces
Parent interviews reconfirmed the ecological nature of effec-
tive parental engagement. Within this ecology, parents interact
with different teachers, parents, friends, and relatives. As a
result, the existing formal and informal spaces in the physi-
cal world often have ill-defined boundaries. For example, a
formal space could entail the whole school (parents, children,
all teachers, etc.), or could only entail one parent and one
teacher (e.g., parent-teacher conferences). Likewise, parents
can have an informal space where they interact with parents
and teachers from different grades and schools. For example,
Esther explains how she has leveraged the knowledge of other
friends who are parents to receive advice on a better school
option for her daughter.
“I wasn’t that thrilled with the [child’s school] experi-
ence. So, I was kind of looking for stuff on my own, trying
to be an advocate for my daughter and just finding what
I could find online. Then when this came up again, my
friend who is an attorney said, ’Oh, you forgot about the
IB Program’, because we were looking at alternatives. I
said, ’You know what? I had that in the back of my mind,
but I kind of forgot it was there.”’ [Esther, mother of 2
middle-schoolers]
It is flexibility in terms of space boundaries what allows par-
ents to garner information for making decisions about how to
support their children’s education. However, our investigation
revealed that the design of existing technologies does not fully
account for such flexible boundaries. In these regards, the sup-
port of technology to the creation and maintenance of spaces
is either too spread out or too restrictive.
From our technology observations we learned that, Class Dojo,
for example, restricts interactions by only allowing parents to
interact with parents of the same classroom. And even then, it
constraints possible ways to interact by only allowing parents
to communicate with others through comments they can post
on school’s and teachers’ posts. This lack of opportunities
for parents to connect with others hinders possibilities for
parents to expand their presence within the parenting ecology.
Something similar happens with technologies that support
informal spaces between parents and teachers, such as email
and SMS. These technologies are good at reinforcing a notion
of connectedness and closeness. However, they do not support
parents ability to engage in meaningful interactions with more
members of the parenting ecology.
In contrast, we observed that technologies such as Facebook
allow too many individuals of the parenting ecology to come
together. This also impacts negatively opportunities for mean-
ingful interactions. For example, a parent-led Facebook group
can have up to 200 to 300 members. This suggests that these
digital environments can become overwhelming for many par-
ents. In addition, although members from Facebook groups
could include teachers from different classes and even par-
ents from different schools, participation is coming often from
the same people. Thus, such technologies discourage many
parents from connecting with others in meaningful ways.
Issues of Inequality
Our observation of existing technology demonstrates that these
tools do not adequately support equitable participation among
all members of the ecology. This, unfortunately, prevents
parents from establishing their presence in the schooling social
system.
Technologies specifically designed for supporting formal
spaces assume schools should be in charge of initiating com-
munication with parents. For instance, in Class Dojo, teachers
have to first post content before parents can make a response.
Likewise, in parent portals, teachers generally have to update
the site with assignments and grades so that parents can react
accordingly. Consequently, parents’ roles in these systems are
more reactionary and they have little agency.
Even technologies like Facebook, that have not been explicitly
designed for schooling endeavors, reinforce inequities. This
tends to happen both in formal and informal spaces, and is
the result of different design decisions. For example, the es-
tablishment of a page ownership (e.g., whoever creates the
page owns it) tends to shape participation in digital formal
spaces. In these spaces, posts by parents on a school Facebook
page can be dismissed or even deleted by school administra-
tors. Although it could be argued that parents are given some
voice by being allowed to post, their voices are vulnerable to
strict moderation and censorship by a higher, more powerful
authority. This, in turn, can make parents feel like the school
does not value their opinions. Informal spaces supported by
Facebook groups also raise issues of voice. These groups have
the potential of broadening parents’ access to members of the
school ecosystem. However, the interactions we observed in
Facebook pages stress that parents need to be cautious of what
they post in these groups. Certain topics, such as complaining
about a teacher, could get parents in trouble with teachers or
school administrators.
In addition, both formal and informal spaces on Facebook
lack mechanisms to foster equitable integration of potentially
marginalized parents. We observed that in these online com-
munities a select group of members with privileged voice
establishes the etiquette and social norms of the space. Par-
ents who are not aware of these norms could, therefore, feel
hesitant to participate because of their lack of knowledge of
the type of questions or responses that are appropriate. For
example, an immigrant parent may not understand what a
potluck means and may feel it is inappropriate to ask teachers
to further explain the concept. Tacit knowledge is best learned
through peer-to-peer communication. As peer-to-peer commu-
nication is either restricted or hard to achieve in these spaces,
parents are not given the opportunity to teach or learn some of
this knowledge.
Fragmentation and Inconsistency
Both our observations of technology and our interviews re-
vealed that current technology fragments parent-school inter-
actions by distributing information via too many channels of
communication. Schools frequently use SMS, Twitter, Face-
book, emails, and paper notifications to send information to
parents. This issue of fragmentation is worsened by the fact
that none of the existing channels can satisfy all the needs of
the ecology. For example, Class Dojo allows parents to see
what is going on in the classroom, but does not show grades.
Parent portals allow parents to see grades, but not what is
happening in the classroom. Such high fragmentation can
hamper meaningful interactions by overwhelming and prevent-
ing parents from making sense of the received information.
Parents, such as Monica and Karl, told us how this fragmen-
tation affected their ability to understand the context of the
information.
“I know [my child’s school has been good. They have
already invited us to join the Facebook page. If you do
Twitter, join this. We got a 16 page newsletter from the
PTA in May. I’m like, ’How long is this thing?’ But it was
great. It gave me so much information. But then because
I’ve never done this before I’m like, ’Is that who I am
going to get my information from, the PTA? Or is it going
to be from the Facebook page?’ How does that work? I
don’t know.” [Monica, mother of 2 middle-schoolers].
“We talk [with teachers], pretty much regularly. For
the most part...If I don’t get a phone call at least once
a week...giving me an update...I get emails. These are
the assignments that are due next week, so I hear from
them pretty regularly...and it kinda gets a little cumber-
some because with one in high school and one in middle
school...there are about 8 different teachers that will con-
tact me *snaps fingers* back-to-back, and it seems like
they always come at the same time for information. ”
[Karl, father of two middle and one high-schooler]
Inconsistency in the way information is managed in some
digital formal spaces is also an issue. Parents, such as Marina,
told us how this affected their engagement.
Marina (M):“ Because communication is an issue, so
we do rely on other parents in the similar grade and we
get information about what they are doing in their class-
rooms and stuff like that, we get information. But some
teachers are very good in posting things online so we can
go and visit their website and get information and some
are not.”
Interviewer (I):“ So do you wish there was more interac-
tion with his teachers?”
M:“ I don’t ... I don’t really wish for that. It’s not going
to change our life in any way but I do feel that if they
had a website set up and there is information updated
on a regular basis, it does help the child and the parents
to kind of stay ahead and be prepared for it.” [Marina,
mother of a middle-schooler]
This inconsistency forces parents to seek other mechanisms
to access relevant information about their children. Anahi
shared how she relies more on her child’s memory that on the
information delivered by digital formal spaces.
“The teachers, most of them have websites that let you
know when things are coming up. Not all of them do
or they are just not able to keep it up or whatever. I
understand that too. So just kinda a variety of ways
between websites and him telling me and most of the
time remembering to study. I just keep asking him, ’Do
you have anything coming up this week?’ He’s usually
pretty good about remembering. That’s probably the
most reliable, is him.” [Anahi, the mother of a middle-
schooler]
The information inconsistency of formal spaces negatively
affects engagement. It can discourage parental intentions to
construct a close relationship with the teacher. This might not
be a problem for parents who have already strong connections
with other members of the ecology. However, for parents who
depend on their relationship with the school and the teacher,
inconsistency can impact the entire parent-school relationship.
Lack of Relevant Non-Academic Information
Current technology supports sharing academic information
well. Applications like a school district’s parent portal, Class
Dojo, and even email can easily, and sometimes immediately,
update parents on their children’s academic progress. Parent
interviews, however, confirm that successfully engaged parents
strive for access to nonacademic information important to their
child’s academic success. Engaged parents, like Jaime, are not
hesitant to move beyond the information teacher provides to
find out how to provide extra-curricular learning opportunities
to their children. He describes the mechanisms he uses to
select and garner ideas for learning experiences:
“Usually every summer we have something that I try to
plug them into. A lot of times it’s art stuff, because that’s
hard to fit in and I do consider that academic, because
involves a lot of the problem-solving. I sort of watch
the kids who are moving and shaking in the school. I’m
usually friends with the parents. So word-of-mouth as to
’what is your kid doing this summer?’ and then you start
finding out about opportunities that may be really good.
I find good stuff, I bookmark it or stick it in a folder, and
I write it down. Is she going to apply this summer for this
program, and when does she need to apply next summer
for another program? You kind of put them in the back
of your mind so that you might know what some of the
criteria might be so that your kids can be ready to be a
competitive applicant for some of the programs.” [Jaime,
father of 2 high-schoolers]
On the other hand, parents who have issues engaging with
the parenting ecology, face a limited access to other members
who can share with them opportunities to better assist their
children. Their access usually depends on how well they know
how to search information or how good their relationship with
teachers is. As a result, many of these parents are either not
aware of existing opportunities or cannot find opportunities
that suites their constraints. For example, Leonor, a working
mother of a middle-schooler, shared that her daughter had no
regular exposure to non-academic educational support (e.g.,
out-of-school programs, museum visits, educational books).
Her answers suggest this lack of exposure is a result of a lack
of interaction with other members of the ecology.
Interviewer: “What about educational books?”
Leonor: “I bought some for her for Christmas.”
I: “What books did you buy?”
L: “I bought like a math book and some writing books.
Those are the ones she needs help with the most, her
writing skills and math.”
I: “Okay. How did you find those books?”
L: “I just looked.”
Gabriela and Rosa told us how hard it has been for them to
look for opportunities on line alone.
“So, she’s interested in everything STEM, you know.
I’m challenged with the cost of after-school programs,
summer programs. I was online today googling around
for affordable programs. There are camps at [local col-
lege], they mostly have programs for high school kids.
Then I did find something on the Boys and Girls site. Try
to get the ball rolling.” [Gabriela - mother of a middle-
schooler]
“He’s brought home some things from school, even
on the engineering route, just some of them are really
expensive. So it’s hard to...you know kind of figure that
out. Some of the programs, like at colleges, like [name
of a local college] or whatever, some of the programs
are, you know, pretty expensive. You know like $3,000 to
do something like that. So it’s kind of hard to.” [Rosa -
mother of a 16 year-old]
Our findings show that existing technologies hosted by schools
are not effectively connecting parents to the rest of the ecology.
Moreover, parents who struggle the most with making connec-
tions are not tapping into informal spaces to build those con-
nections on their own. Despite technology facilitating some
teacher to parent communication, our interviews indicated
that this was not enough for parents to be effectively engaged
with their child’s education. In order to give all parents the
opportunity to engage, parent-school technologies need to go
Figure 1. Interaction Space Overview
Figure 2. Single Interaction Space
beyond providing academic information in three main ways.
They need to: 1) enable parents to engage with teachers and
other parents in more equitable and open manner, 2) create
connections across groups, and 3) expose enable parents to
make the most out of the available learning opportunities.
DESIGN GUIDELINES FOR INTERACTION SPACES
The findings indicate that current technologies do not support
community-building amongst members of the parental ecol-
ogy. Four issues were identified: inflexibility in the boundaries
of spaces, fragmentation and inconsistency of information, in-
equity, and lack of relevant non-academic information. To
address these issues, we propose a set of design guidelines for
digital interaction spaces. These guidelines will allow parents
and school actors (teachers, staff, etc.) to engage in meaning-
ful interactions and come together as an equitable community.
(Figure 1). In the following sections, we describe the pro-
posed design guidelines and suggest possible technological
approaches that could be used to realize them.
Support Equitable Informal Spaces
Our findings showed that informal spaces are key for parental
engagement. These spaces allow parents to connect with other
members of the ecology and learn from them. Thus, an inter-
action space that fosters the parenting ecology should offer
members (parents and teachers) equal opportunities take the
lead in the communication and on forming groups with other
members. To enable equitable opportunities for all members of
the space to issue their voice, an interaction space must strive
to safeguard privacy and security-a balance that is hard to
achieve. Different types of conversations require different lev-
els of privacy. For example, in a conversation around teacher
performance, there may be a chilling effect if a parent knows a
teacher can view the conversation. Utilizing privacy-by-design
principles, parents can have conversations with other parents
or form groups that allow proper privacy controls.
Allow Members to Define Community’s Boundaries
Parents do not always connect with parents or teachers from
their children’s school. Our findings demonstrated that suc-
cessfully engaged parents transcend the boundaries of the
school. In fact, parents can connect and align themselves
along a variety of identities, such as ethnicities (e.g., parents
of black students in private schools of Chicago) and special
needs (e.g., parents of autistic children in rural areas). In
addition, as we learned during our technology observations,
extremely large formal and informal spaces tend to hinder
meaningful interactions. An interaction space should allow
members to define the boundaries that best suit their social
and communication needs so as to enable all users to exercise
their voices.
Augment Opportunities for Connection
Avenues for information exchanges can maximize resourceful-
ness of the entire community, increase the diversity of voices
and perspectives, and facilitate meaningful interactions. In-
stead of just a single interaction space, where one community
comes together (Figure 2), there can be multiple interaction
spaces, each with their own configuration and properties (Fig-
ure 3). For example, each space can be a single grade or class.
A huge challenge for multiple spaces is the ability to effec-
tively leverage the tacit knowledge of the whole community.
This could be addressed by introducing machine intelligence
to the system. Approaches such as a generative profile build-
ing can allow members across spaces to communicate. For
example, a teacher from the third grade, can reach out a teacher
from sixth grade to ask a specific question, or a parent (from
space A) with some specialized knowledge can help his/her
peer (from space B) with a special question.
Provide a Unified and Organized Source of Information
An interaction space that enables meaningful interactions
amongst members should also address issues of fragmentation
of information. Our findings showed that numerous channels
of communication often bombarded parents with information,
which hindered their ability to make sense of that information.
An interaction space should offer a unified channel of com-
munication that gathers and integrates information from other
channels. Members should be able to define the type and fre-
quency of information they receive. In addition, information in
this space should be organized and streamlined in a way that is
meaningful for parents. Automation mechanisms fed by user
preferences could be used to achieve this goal; for instance,
the space can leverage options such as crowd-sourced tagging
(e.g., similar to online Stackoverflow forums) or automatic-
topic tagging (e.g., similar to the question-answering platform
Quora) or a combination of these.
An interaction space should avoid becoming yet another tool
that parents have to learn to use to keep up-to-date with school.
To address this issue, we suggest leveraging parents’ existing
Figure 3. Connected Interaction Spaces
knowledge of current technologies (e.g., parent portals, Face-
book, text messages, and emails). Features of the interaction
space should be inspired from familiar platforms to reduce the
learning curve to increase adoption.
Enable Access to Relevant Information
Access to relevant information, both academic and nonaca-
demic, is vital for parents. We found that successfully engaged
parents often resort to a group of teachers and peers as their
go-to people for accessing key information. For many other
parents, however, effective go-to people are harder to iden-
tify. This is especially true for parents who are new to the
community or lack social capital or both. Interaction spaces
should allow for information to be decentralized and delivered
to members of the community in a way that is meaningful to
them.
A potential approach for satisfying this guideline is to leverage
machine intelligence. The intelligence can match opportuni-
ties, parents, events, etc. by indexing the relevant information.
Topic modeling techniques can distillate key points in people’s
interactions. Using the topics most discussed by a user, a
profile about that user can be built over time in a generative
manner. For example, if the parent of a child engages in a
lot of discussions around college opportunities, the system
can use natural language understanding and topic modeling
techniques to add tags to the said parents profile dimensions.
When a new member asks for recommendations on funding
opportunities to attend college (a previously indexed topic),
the space should have intelligence in the back-end that curates
and channels questions to the appropriate parties.
Make it Matter
Understanding and leveraging motivation of parents is impor-
tant in designing the space. Broadly speaking, we can design
the space taking advantage of parental motivation in three
areas: benefit to the child, relevant nonacademic information,
and peer-based social communities. In terms of benefit to the
child, parental engagement (or lack thereof) about the educa-
tion system impacts the child’s education [16, 12, 4]. As a
result, there is value in seeking out meaningful engagement
with other parents and teachers.
As our findings revealed, parents want to access relevant
nonacademic information. This entails information about ex-
tracurricular activities, as well as information around social
and cultural norms. For instance, issues around how long
should a child stay for a sleepover, what to bring to a potluck,
how to organize holiday events in a school, etc. Even if a par-
ent is knowledgeable and successfully engaged to the parental
ecology, incorporating a diverse perspective can improve the
knowledge base and allow for better parental engagement.
There is also a social benefit to parents if they are engaged.
Parents can meet other people who are in similar life stages and
motivated by a common goal of engagement in their children’s
education, which can foster membership into a community.
Such facilitated interactions become even more important for
working or busy parents who may not have many opportunities
to engage in communal activities. In an inclusive environment,
parents may feel less intimidated to voice their feelings and
concerns.
RESEARCH AGENDA
There are areas such as privacy, community management, com-
pliance, and sustainability that require further investigation to
make the proposed design guidelines robust. The following
sections go over the need to investigate further across those
four areas.
•Privacy-related issues
: Since discussions in the interaction
space can involve sensitive information, such as grades
or (physical and mental) health related, it is important to
establish the right balance between privacy and security.
To develop privacy-by-design principles, it is relevant to
further investigate topics such as cultural factors and the
role of anonymity in parent-school interactions.
•Community Management
: Stewardship of the community
is important. However, mechanisms to establish policies and
codes of conduct should be designed considering the need
to foster equitable interactions. Exploring infrastructures
that allow communities to develop codes of conduct should
be investigated, rather than assuming a one-size fits all
approach.
•Analytics
: Assessing the impact of an interaction space on
parental engagement is key for its sustainability. There is a
range of methods that could gather data related to parenting
and schools. For example, data on interaction dynamics
such as number of messages, average length, and overall
sentiment, could be collected to get a rough sense of user
engagement. Computing network dynamics, density of
network, and average activity in the network could gauge
engagement at a sub-group or group level. Further investi-
gation is needed to determine the most optimal criteria of
analysis.
•Formative research with school actors
: While our study
was focused on parents needs, formative research with
school actors (teachers, staff, and administrators), is im-
portant as they are essential parts of the interaction space.
For an interaction space to be successful, it will need to
meet the requirements of all actors, including issues such
as teacher workloads, and administrative challenges in com-
municating with parents.
CONCLUSION
Parental engagement should be considered a relational phe-
nomenon that depends on interactive relationships between
parents, teachers, and other school actors in the school envi-
ronment [1]. Our findings reveal critical issues that are not
supported by existing technology, restricting meaningful com-
munications within the parenting ecology. To address these
issues, we proposed design guidelines for an interaction space
and suggest possible technological approaches that could be
used to realize them. The interaction spaces in our platform
go beyond the communication realm and support parental en-
gagement through community-building. Technology needs
to go beyond just facilitating a space for communication. It
needs to enhance the inherent dynamic and social component
of the communication.
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