Investigating the interactions between parents and teachers in a Shad network space: Virtual Ethnography

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Associate Professor, Faculty of Educational Sciences and Psychology, Birjand University, Birjand, Iran.

2 Phd student of Curriculum Planning, Birjand University, Birjand, Iran

Abstract

Family and school are two complementary educational spaces and parents have a decisive role in the executive mechanisms of formal education, so it is necessary to have a continuous relationship with the teacher as the key element of school and education. Due to the spread of the Corona virus and the virtualization of education, virtual parent-teacher interaction has become part of the home-school relationship. The present article aims to examine the interactions between parents and teachers in the Shad network space as a formal space in virtual education. Using virtual ethnography method, this study has studied 10 Shad network subjects in the first and second grades of elementary school from the perspective of examining the typology of virtual interactions between parents and teachers over a period of approximately six months. During the field work, offline and online interviews were conducted with the teachers of these ten classes at different intervals. After collecting data from two methods of observation and semi-structured interviews, they were analyzed in maxQda software. Findings showed that virtual interactions between parents and teachers were in two types of academic and non-academic interactions that extracurricular interactions have increased compared to previous years.

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