Saturday, March 22, 2008

Parental Education

Williamson, D. A. (2006, September 7). Students suffer a new digital divide?. Retrieved March 18, 2008, from eMarketer Web site: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1004148
(Webpage)

This article, “Students Suffer A New Digital Divide?”, by Debra Williamson, is fairly short, but I had a sudden realization as I read it; a realization that I should have had a long time ago, but somehow didn’t. (I think my brain is just wore out J)

Williamson took information from a report put out by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), concerning the digital divide that surrounds us today. She mentions the two main factors that we hear most about when reading about the digital divide: income and race/ethnicity. However, she brought to light a new factor for me, parental education.

Now that I have this factor in my head, it makes a lot of sense. We can assume that parental education effects the type of job you have, which in turn effects your income level. So, we can somewhat infer that the two factors might be related, although not in all cases.

Two main points I took from this article are as follows:

· “…among US students Internet use may be influenced strongly by parental income and education level” (Williamson, 2006).
· “Schools play an important role in bridging and eventually eliminating the various digital divides. ‘Students are more likely to use the Internet at school than at home when they have any of several characteristics: Hispanic or Black race/ethnicity, no parent who attended college, a single-mother head of household, a Spanish monolingual household, or family income below $35,000 per year,’ (NCES) " (Williamson, 2006).

The chart shown below is a great visual representation of how the digital divide is affected by parental education level.





(Williamson, 2006)

This whole idea of parental education level relates to my students A LOT! Many of my students have parents who didn’t even graduate from high school, let alone college or higher. That factor alone doesn’t mean that you will be in poverty and not technologically advanced, but when that factor leads to the parents not working, not valuing education, and not seeing a need for technology, then it becomes a problem.

Some thoughts that always enter my mind, but now are at the forefront, are: Is lack of education a cycle in some families? Are my students going to be able to rise above their parents beliefs against education and get a good education for themselves? Is this just one huge trap that some kids are in?

How sad…..it’s even more sad that I can see the faces of specific kids from my classes that might possible be caught in this trap forever. What can I do to help them?

1 comment:

Sabrina said...

Wow! Great article. I agree that parents' educational level could have a HUGE effect on their children's educational level as well as their views on technology. It would be interesting to survey those parents and see if they felt that technology was not important, or if they are just "in the dark" about it, or possibly that they want the technology/education but don't have the means to finance it (college/Internet service). This phenomenon is also found in literacy studies. Research says that the more children are read to before they enter school, they better their chances of learning to read AND learning to reading fluently. I do feel like it is a cycle...it reminds me of two of the learning theories we read about: Observational Learning and Social Cognition. I feel that students do tend to observe and model what they see...if they see that their parents do not value education/technology then there is a high chance that thy will not value it, either. This is where you come in!! If they can learn the value of education/technology at school and see you as a model then hopefully this can change their perspective and "break the cycle." Or if we go more with the social cognition theory, you would need to create a whole culture in your classroom of students who are excited about technology and education because students learn what and how to think from the culture they are around the most. Either way you look at it, YOU are going to be the primary factor in helping your students overcome this digital divide. Or to quote another famous person (lol), I sort of compare being a teacher with being Spiderman when he says "With great power comes great responsibility." As teachers I do believe we have great power and with that comes the responsibility to do everything possible to better the lives of our students. I think you are doing a great job. Being in this class shows that you are trying to learn ways to help your students. Keep up the good work!!
Sabrina