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All in One Group: Current Practices, Lessons and Challenges of Chinese Home-School Communication in IM Group Chat

Published: 07 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

When schools and families form a good partnership, children benefit. With the recent flourishing of communication apps, families and schools in China have shifted their primary communication channels to chat groups hosted on popular instant-messenger(IM) tools such as WeChat and QQ. With an interview study consisting of 18 parents and 9 teachers, followed by a survey study with 210 teachers, we found that IM group chat has become the most popular way that the majority of parents and teachers communicate, from among the many different channels available. While there are definite advantages to this kind of group chat, we also found a number of problematic issues, including a lack of privacy and repeated negative feedback shared by both parents and teachers. We discuss our results on how IM-based group chat could affect Chinese teachers’ authoritative figures, affect Chinese teacher’s work-life balance and potentially compromise Chinese students’ privacy.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
          May 2021
          10862 pages
          ISBN:9781450380966
          DOI:10.1145/3411764
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          Published: 07 May 2021

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          Author Tags

          1. WeChat
          2. computer-mediated communication
          3. group chat
          4. home-school communication
          5. parental engagement

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          View all
          • (2025)Countering Misinformation in Private Messaging Groups: Insights From a Fact-checking ChatbotProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/37011899:1(1-30)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2025
          • (2023)Parents’ digital Labor and disrupted parent-teacher relationships: theorizing Chinese parents’ voices from the home-based online learningAsia Pacific Journal of Education10.1080/02188791.2023.2176821(1-13)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2023
          • (2022)Veteran Critical Theory as a Lens to Understand Veterans' Needs and Support on Social MediaProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35129806:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
          • (2022)Remote Co-teaching in Rural Classroom: Current Practices, Impacts, and ChallengesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501924(1-16)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022

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