Abstract
Digital technology usage in the home learning context is complicated and contextual. Parental life experiences, their digital self-efficacy, transnational status and socio-cultural contexts determine the way parents experience engagement with these technologies. For first generation transnational parents, this engagement is multi-layered, ridden with complexities of settling in the host country while maintaining multiple networks of connection to their country of origin. Set against this backdrop, this study engages with parents from Asian Indian and Bangladeshi transnational communities in England to explore their experiences of mediation through digital technologies to support their children’s learning. The Asian Indian and Bangladeshi communities constitute 4.2 percent of the total population of England and Wales according to the 2021 census (ONS 2022). These communities are not neat categories but are internally differentiated along the lines of region, religion, class, gender, language, among others. Digital technology usage is also varied with sections of Bangladeshi community suffering debilitating digital exclusion. Data on digital technology usage by ethnicity in the census data is not very revealing. Therefore, it is important to explore parental narratives to gain knowledge about their technology usage, the problems they encounter and the innovative strategies they use.I adopted a phenomenological methodology to explore the lived experiences of these parents with digital technology. Data was collected from twelve parents living in a town in the South-West of England, out of which eight came from India and four were of Bangladeshi origin. All the participants claimed to be belonging to the middle class, though closer look revealed differentiation in terms of religion, region of origin, language, social customs, and occupation. Vygotskian concept of ‘mediation’ was used as an analytical tool to make sense of rich data. Thematic analysis of the findings led to the consolidation of three main themes: significance of parental life history, particularly their interaction with digital technology during their childhood and formative years in determining their mediational strategies; secondly, their employment of a variety of strategies in their mediational process, and finally emergence of conflicts, dichotomies and doubts in the form of dialectics in the mediational process, which parents endeavour to navigate thereby charting a path forward and in the process continually reshaping the mediational process.
| Date of Award | 18 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Rita Chawla-Duggan (Supervisor) & Michael Donnelly (Supervisor) |
Cite this
- Standard