Developing Immigrant Parents’ Computer Learning in Partnership with Students’ Learning

Principal Investigators: Richard Durán Jane Durán UC Santa Barbara INTEGRATED SUMMARY Description of Project This project is addressing the need for improving Latino immigrant parents’ and children’s joint understanding and accomplishment of learning by assisting parents in acquiring knowledge about the operation and use of computers as powerful tools for learning. Over a 5-year period the project will develop materials and activities assisting parents’ learning and will document parents’ acquisition of skills and accomplishments using both quantitative and qualitative methods. As the project develops the capacity to assist parents it will embark on a plan of work to connect parents’ computer skills learning to learning activities jointly conducted in collaboration with children in parent computer learning settings or in the classroom. Evidence of parents’ and children’s joint accomplishments as a "community of learners" will be documented and analyzed using qualitative and quantitative methods focusing on identification and elaboration of literacy and thinking skills exercised in joint activities and their connections to children’s schooling experiences and outcomes. A central question for the research project is: How do immigrant parent and children computer learning activities create new sociocultural resources promoting children’s educational achievement? This is a fundamentally new question for the field and we anticipate our research will identify critical directions that might be of assistance to others initiating immigrant family literacy programs associated with improving children’s educational outcomes. A strategies manual for implementation of similar programs will be developed and disseminated as one final product of the project. Plan of Work So far both Year 1 and Year 2 of the project have been completed in accordance with the original plan of work. During Year 1 pre- and post self-assessment oral questionnaires were developed to measure parents’ growth in computer skills. During this first year 13 parents participated in computer learning activities at the Isla Vista Elementary School in Goleta, CA. At the close of Year 1 on June 30, 1997, these parents had successfully learned to operate a computer and learned word and graphics processing skills using the programs Storybook Weaver and the Bilingual Writing Center. In addition they had been introduced to use the Internet. Parent pre-assessment data indicated that only one parent in this first cohort of parents had prior hands-on experience with computers. By the end of the half-dozen training sessions all parents had produced with their children at least one written product. The products tended to be essays and stories detailing episodes in family life. An interesting development was that there was frequent discussion among parents, children, and project staff about the content and compilation of their products. Since children of the parents were in general already familiar with Storybook Weaver and Bilingual Writing Center software, the children were able to assist their parents in the creation of written products. During Year 2, from July 1, 1997 to June 30, 1998, the project added a second site. Although additional work was done at the original site, the Isla Vista Elementary School, an additional site was established at the Goleta Boys and Girls Club at the Goleta Valley Community Center. This site serves children attending La Patera Elementary School whose school computer laboratory was targeted for use in year three of the project. During year two a grand total of 24 parents participated in computer learning activities at the two sites, with 11 at the Isla Vista site and 13 at the Boys and Girls Club site. In each case computer learning activities for parents proceeded from learning to use Storybook Weaver, to learning the more advanced Bilingual Writing Center, followed by initial experiences in learning to use the Internet. Original written products of the parents again tended to focus on familial experiences and themes, but this time each site produced an expanded written product, a newsletter. Publication of a newsletter has figured prominently in our design of the project. We believe that publishing of a newsletter can provide focus and direction for parent computer learning activities and related joint learning activities with children. One of the goals of parent-child learning activities comes to be communicating expressions of cultural knowledge and learning to other audiences who are themselves parents and children, educators, and the community at large. Parent pre- and post-assessment questionnaire data for year 2 showed a statistically significant gain in parents’ computer skill learning over the course of participation at both sites-see year 2 report for statistical details. In year three, commencing July 1998, we began planning and implementing parent computer learning activities that would involve children more intensively and have more direct connection to children’s schooling and classroom experiences. In the Fall of 1998 we began using the La Patera School computer laboratory as our primary computer learning site. We were unable to re-open the site at Isla Vista School as the school was closed and torn while a new physical plant was constructed. The La Patera site replaced our use of the Goleta Boys and Girls Club site. The new site had the advantage of better equipment: more than 20 recent Macintosh computers with multimedia capacity with all computers connected to the Internet via a high capacity digital phone line connection. Connecting parents’ computer learning to children’s educational outcomes represents the greatest challenge our project faces. Our initial project proposal suggested that we might search for evidence of children’s improved educational outcomes related to parent computer learning by comparing standardized test scores of children whose parents had or had not participated in computer learning activities. As we commenced year 3 we realized that this goal was not wise and that we needed to focus on designing and exploring very concrete ways to connect parents’ computer learning and children’s learning. Several circumstances led to this shift. First, the parents who participated in computer learning activities had children who attended a variety of grades and who had different teachers. Accordingly, it seemed impractical to expect that parents’ activities would map smoothly and coherently onto children’s classroom activities–though we would welcome such overlap where feasible. Parents’ own educational and literacy background raised a second concern. We saw a great variation in the formal education levels and knowledge of children’s schooling experience among parents. Parents varied considerably in their writing and reading practices in ways that were important to understanding how their children are expected to read, write, and think in classrooms. We realized that we would need to work closely with parents and children together in computer activities in order to ground shared understandings of the goals and organization of joint learning activities related to classroom and schooling experiences. Our research teams’ capacity to understand how to connect parent computer activities to children’s learning activities also arose as a concern. We discovered that in order for us to design and create worthwhile parent and child activities that we would need to learn how to do so through experience and feedback. We had not encountered this challenge in the initial phase of the project where we concentrated solely on assisting parents in learning to use computers and the internet in a more superficial manner not connected to deep learning goals shared by parents and children. In responding to these challenges in year 3 we have undertaken two major changes to our project. The first change was to bring two La Patera School 5th and 6th grade classroom teachers into the project as full participants. These teachers are assisting in the design and implementation of computer learning activities based on their classroom learning activities and active use of computers in their students’ learning. (Also, this fall we will bring in a third teacher collaborator from the former Isla Vista School into the project to plan and implement future parent activities for this school). A second change, closely related to this first change, is to focus our work on conceptually and empirically analyzing how to computer learning activities for parents and children viewed as a cultural community of practice (Rogoff, Matusov, and White, 1996). The conceptual shift is significant. We now view our project as a collaboration between parents, children, teachers, and the research team. The goals of this collaboration is to work together to develop and guide computer learning activities that evolve from sharing experiences on how computers can be used to promote important forms of learning tied to children’s schooling success. The attainment of this goal is not an open search for worthwhile activities. In the La Patera School context we are drawing on our teachers’ own curricular goals and knowledge of school-wide curricular goals, and our research teams analysis of standards-informed education "reform." From among many possibilities in year three we are focusing on computer activities for parents and children that involve: 1) writing narratives such as biographies and legends; and 2) conduct of small-scale research projects using an inquiry scheme used in classrooms known as "KWLQ", and 3) publication of a newsletter drawing in part on the two foregoing activity types. While parents and children will have a wide variety of additional learning experiences through our project, focus on the three activities cited will provide us with concrete activities and products that we can empirically investigate in order to document parents’ and children’s learning in a manner systematically related to children’s schooling experience. This investigation will use a relational database (FileMaker Pro) to aggregate and organize ethnographic field note data on parents’ and children’s computer learning activities and products by computer learning session. The relational database will supplement pre- and post-assessment data from parents and will feature 3 facets for data analysis purposes. These facets are deeply interrelated and reflect an activity theory perspective on how to foreground and interpret data on parents and children’s learning accomplishments from a developmental perspective. One facet "activity" will be used to identify and subcategorize each major activity-type undertaken by parents and children (e.g., activities undertaken in order to write a legend) and will have associated with it all ethnographic field notes and note segments, video tapes, parent and children products documenting the activity and its progression over time and learning session. A second facet featured in the data base is "artifacts produced." This facet will organize information about specific product types produced by parents and children within and across activities (e.g., the artifact type "legend" in its final published form). The third facet is "person(s)" this facet will foreground who was involved in each activity and product. All three facets will assist in tracing how the joint productive activity of parents and children manifests itself over time. E.g., we will analyze and compare the literacy and thinking practices required of children and parents over time across activities. We will also analyze and compare the qualities of written artifacts over time. And we will focus on individual parents or children’s participation in activities and the qualities of their products over time. This will be a considerable effort and will constitute a major research objective of year 3 and will be documented in our year 3 report. Conduct of the foregoing activities in year 3 will lay the basis for year 4 and 5 activities. In these years we will replicate strategies drawing on year 3 progress and that reflect parents’ children’s’, and teachers’ advice as well as input from project staff. We anticipate that as the project evolves that we are creating a community of practice whose formative goals are to no small extent "emergent." For example, it is quite possible and desirable, that our project might motivate some parents to become active in assisting other parents and children with computer learning. If this development were to occur we could expand and disseminate strategies of our project to new parents and children, and new settings. Program Themes In conjunction with our Program themes of Family, Peers, Schools and the Community, the work done through our project uses an integrated cross-ecology approach towards improving children’s educational outcomes. We are concerned with keeping the educational pipeline open for children by promoting learning opportunities for children that extend beyond the classroom, but that are linked to classroom learning goals. Our use of after school computer learning venues for parents and children, in effect, creates a new community institution based on a partnership between families, the school, and university. Our project stresses new strategies for bringing parents into contact with their children’s schooling and its reliance on technology, and provides parents with new, electronic tools for their own learning. Our emphasis on publication of newsletters coincides with similar strategies for communication and dissemination adopted by other Program projects and portends future efforts to create systematic communications between the program and a range of community and national constituencies–e.g., via World Wide Web publication of newsletters should resources become available. CREDE Center Unifying Themes A. Sociotheoretical Foundation Our project is informed by cultural psychology perspectives drawing on activity theory, Vygotskian accounts of learning, and development, situated cognition, and constructionism. Our project makes use of the notion of moment-to-moment creation of culture as activity. The participants in the project (parents, children, teachers, and university project staff) constitute a community of learners that creates opportunities for sharing and pursuing knowledge through the use of technology. Together we build an understanding of how children’s schooling opportunities use technology and at the same time create new opportunities to learn together. B. Five Generic Principles 1. Facilitate learning through joint productive activity among teachers and students. Our activities are focused on parent/child interaction, but add attention to teachers and the university research as collaborators and partners in joint productive learning activity. 2. Develop competence in the language and literacy of instruction throughout all instructional activities. Competency in communication is central to all our activities. Many parents have told us that this is one of the first extensive literacy-rich activities in which they have been able to engage outside the home since moving to the U.S. But "literacy" in our project extends beyond helping parents and children with acquisition of isolated competencies in reading and writing. It extends to using reading and writing as tools for learning and exploration of knowledge, and extends to developing an awareness of electronic forms of literacy linking knowledge and knowledge exploration as a new form of cultural expression and field for personal, familial, and community development. 3. Contextualize teaching and curriculum in the experiences and skills of home and community. The activities and products of our project are highly contextualized and build upon the cultural, social, and linguistic resources of parents, children, teachers, and the research team. We have found that this occurs naturally, for parents e.g., as almost all of the parents want, as their first word processing product, to produce something that reflects home/family activity. Indeed, many of the parents have been very specific in their home, community, and cultural experience-related themes. For example, parents have elected freely to write about topic such as the meaning of friendship, care-taking experiences with children, challenges in adapting to life in the U.S., and work experiences. 4. Challenge students toward cognitive complexity. Along with use of the internet, use of electronic multimedia artifacts such as CD-Roms including Spanish-language encyclopedias is encouraged in the parent/child interaction projects has heightened the degree of cognitive complexity manifest in the project activities and products. For example, one preliminary activity in an introductory setting at the Isla Vista Elementary School site involved parent’s and children’s investigation of marine animals and life through the use of Grolier's Spanish-language CD-ROM encyclopedia. Almost all of the parents reported that they found this activity engrossing, and they were excited and thrilled to be able to find information about various animals at their fingertips. Thus they were introduced to a new activity in which most of them probably would not have otherwise been able to participate. Our year 3 activities at La Patera School feature joint work by parents and children on complex learning activities such as investigation and creative authorship of legends involving use of the internet, CD-ROMs, and related software. Parents are also being introduced to the notion of a research project and will conduct a project in collaboration with children using various computer-based technologies.. 5. Engage students through dialogue, especially the instructional conversation The students are engaging in dialogue with their parents when they assist them in the computer-related activities. A frequent finding of the project has been that most of the students have skills that the parents simply do not possess. Indeed, many of the students have helped the parents initially. Students provide a wide variety of support to parents through their interaction with them. But it is important to note that parents in turn introduce new knowledge to children. For example, in a recent session, parents introduced children to fables and legends from Mexico that children were not aware of. Implications The implications of our project findings are that parents with little or no previous computer literacy can acquire substantial literacy given hands-on training. However, it is clear that learning simple skills in operating computers and the Internet is not a panacea for improving parents’ awareness of schools’ expectations of students, nor an automatic tool for improving children’s learning as a result of parents’ increased familiarity with computers. Economically at-risk Latino immigrant families are often most concerned with meeting basic survival needs of their families. These concerns coupled with lack of familiarity with written and spoken English and additional lack of familiarity with community resources frequently keep parents from being able to assist their children more with their schoolwork or assist their children in the articulation of long-term goals (Delgado-Gaitan and Trueba, 1991). On the other hand, when parents are able to so involve themselves, evidence indicates that deep and long-lasting changes can occur (Azmitia et al, 1995; Ochs and Duranti, 1995). Until recently, there has not been adequate attention paid theoretically to how to ameliorate this gap in parental training and involvement at the level of computers and electronic literacy. This project aims at overcoming this gap. Reflection Project's contribution to increase knowledge of practice and theory As indicated above, our project helps to fill the gap in current research having to do with the impact of specific kinds of literacy training on low-income Latino families. As the importance of computers increases in our society, and as training provided even to elementary school children on computers continues to increase and expand, it will become increasingly urgent to try to be clear about ways in which interventions might make a difference for computer literacy. Use of effective methods Our research methods are both quantitative and qualitative and are tied to our principal research questions. We use descriptive and inferential statistics to investigate growth in parents’ computer skills and to track parents and children’s attendance and participation in project activities. We use ethnographic methodology informed by activity theory and situated cognition perspectives to investigate the conduct and development of products of parents and children through joint computer learning activities. We are using a relational data base to aggregate and structure systematic probes of parents’ and children’s’ learning over time featuring the evolution, interconnection, and qualities of computer learning activities, artifacts produced through activities, and the learning trajectories and accomplishments of individual parents and children. Contributions to current research in the field This project appears to be one of the very first attempts nationally to investigate ways that immigrant parent computer training can be connected to children’s learning and to development of new after school institutions in collaboration with a University for this purpose. Benefits of the work in relation to cost It is very difficult to build action-oriented research projects linking schools, universities, and immigrant families. The present project is cost effective because it builds on a program of cross-ecology research studies being conducted by the research team. The fuller team is conducting a multiple year program of research with teachers at the two schools involved in this project supported by the CRESPAR research center. The CRESPAR project has aided teachers in implementing instructional strategies such as those used in computer learning activities in the current project. The two teachers recruited thus far to assist parents in this project are members of the local CRESPAR network of teachers. In addition, the current project draws on accomplishments of the UC Links after school computer club based at the Goleta Boys and Girls Club. This project known as "Club Proteo" is supported by the UC Office of the President. Research conducted by the Club Proteo project has supported the training of research assistants to the current project and has included development of a prototype relational data base system being used to organize data analysis for the current project. Connections of the project to other programs We currently maintain a connection to Margarita Azmitia's and Catherine Cooper’s Program 3 project, and we have been working with her to strengthen those ties. As reported earlier, a joint newsletter product has been created, and we continue to envision new paths of joint activity. Impact As indicated, our project will be one of the first to have established methods of introducing computer literacy to low-income immigrant Latino families. We believe our project will yield both conceptual tools and practical materials and strategies informing the development and evaluation of family-school programs employing technology as a means of joint parent-child learning. We believe the problems and challenges we are encountering and gradually overcoming in the present project will provide important lessons for the field. We are learning that we cannot simply connect parent acquisition of computer skills to children’s schooling outcomes and that it will prove valuable to reconceptualize how we approach learning itself as a joint productive activity involving a partnership between parents, children, teachers, and a university research team. The lessons we our learning should prove valuable to educators and policy makers who wish to propose and implement efforts to improve educational outcomes for children from low socioeconomic and culturally diverse backgrounds. Next Steps As outlined in our Plan of Work we intend to continue to expand our project. During Years 3-5 we hope not only to serve more adults, but to be better able to document tie-ins between the adults' acquisition of computer literacy and the school projects in which their children are engaged. To this end, we currently have Goleta Valley Unified School District teachers at work on this integration, as indicated above. Program Collaboration As indicated previously, we have been in collaboration with Margarita Azmitia's and Catherine Cooper’s Program 3 project. Deliverables A Year 2 Report has been delivered, and several semi-annual reports, the most recent one of which covers the period April 1, 1998 to September 30, 1998. Products Newsletters produced by the parents in conjunction with their participation at the Isla Vista School site and the Goleta Boys and Girls Club site were published in year 2, and it is anticipated that another newsletter is forthcoming from the La Patera school site in year 3. This pattern will continue in years 4 and 5. The project also envisions dissemination of project information and summarization of research results through the production of academic conference papers and journal articles.