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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 2021Publication 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

            Copyright © 2021 ACM

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            • Published: 7 May 2021

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