All hands on deck: exploring how Latinx families in California supported child learning during the initial Covid-19 shutdown

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on family perspectives of school and home-based learning during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, revealing both what is lost and gained as a result of families being more intimately involved in the academic training of their children. Through the use of qualitative interviews, researchers found that parents (1) addressed challenges related to virtual learning on their own, (2) actively guided their children’s learning journeys and (3) engaged in collective efforts to ensure the well-being of their children. These findings suggest that as the school systems responded to the pandemic and home became a site of academic learning, the home also became a site of everyday ingenuity as parents applied a kind of pedagogical improvisation and accessed funds of knowledge to design learning spaces and scheduling frameworks.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• family learning
• qualitative research
• sociocultural theory
• funds of knowledge

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to recognize and appreciate the participants in this study that allowed us access into how learning from home during the pandemic affected their family life.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Stanford-Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative and Stanford TELOS Initiative.