Abstract
An emerging research base has highlighted various roles and responsibilities that parents of students with disabilities accept when they enroll their children in online schools. Since finding and using online texts and using various programs and applications that require search and evaluation skills to do work are typical for online learning, it follows that part of parent responsibilities in many families might involve using basic technological literacies or even more advanced digital ones. To focus on the range of technological literacies that parents employ, researchers gathered self-report data from parents about how they engage with online education technologies while working with their children with disabilities. Interviews with (n = 32) parents across six states in the West, Midwest, and Southern United States revealed that parents employ various skills with a specific set of purposes in mind. Literacies were used to (a) perform basic technological computing tasks, (b) evaluate information to supplement existing instructional materials, and (c) communicate with the school about children’s needs. Reported purposes for using these skills emerged as (a) instructing, (b) monitoring, (c) advocating, and (d) learning school expectations. Implications of this study include the potential for literacy-based approaches to parent preparation for supporting vulnerable children in online settings.
Highlights
K-12 student enrollment in fully online learning schools, programs, and courses enjoyed a steady 6% annual growth since 2009 (Digital Learning Collaborative, 2019)
The number of children who were being educated in online environments and who qualified for special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA 2004) has been steadily increasing alongside the general education population (Molnar et al, 2015)
Previous research has documented that the parents of students with disabilities are given and expect to accept even greater demands on their time and skills to support their children in online schools (Rice & Carter, 2015, Rice, et al, 2019)
Summary
K-12 student enrollment in fully online learning schools, programs, and courses enjoyed a steady 6% annual growth since 2009 (Digital Learning Collaborative, 2019). The result is that schools and parents are vulnerable to being confused about what they can and should do for children versus what the schools should provide in terms of support (Rice & Deschaine, 2021) This is especially important where students with disabilities are concerned because they have rights to services in the United States and many other countries (IDEA, 2004; Márton et al, 2013). Many of these skills are grounded in practices associated with various types of literacies that are becoming part of everyday life in a digital world (e.g., using and producing digital texts, finding and evaluating information, navigating applications) (Martzoukou & Abdi, 2017). To this point, Kellner (2000) offered the following definition:
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