Web 2.0 Technologies and Parent Involvement: Multicultural Perspectives

• In Event: Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: Beyond Technology Integration: What Other Variables Matter?

Abstract

This study explores how the parents of ELL students participated in a blog-mediated writing curriculum in a second grade classroom at a U.S. urban school, and how they supported their children’s academic literacy development. Adopting multicultural perspectives of technologies, this study views blog-mediated literacy as discursive practices that are shaped by one’s social, cultural, and political access, beyond material access. Adopting ethnographic methods, I collected and analyzed data such as parents’ and students’ blogs, videotaped classroom interactions, and interviews. The findings indicate that parents used blogging to support their children’s various academic and social goals, bringing expanded audiences and meaningful purposes to academic literacy activities. Their cultural and linguistic capital related to Web 2.0 tools generated different affordances.

Author

• Dong-shin Shin, Northern Illinois University