Connected Learning Summit 2019

This symposium brings together researchers and practitioners to share cutting edge initiatives that support immigrant parents’ participation in connected learning environments. From a connected learning perspective, it is essential for young people to have the support of a network of peers, teachers, and parents facilitating their pursuit of personal interests or passions, as well as their ability to link these experiences to academic achievement. While there has been a growing interest in exploring the role of parents in these networks, we are just beginning to understand how parents from non-dominant backgrounds such as immigrants and refugees fit in this picture. These groups’ differences from the norm often keep them in conditions of extreme information poverty, complicating their ability to harness resources for advancing their children’s lives. Against this background, in this symposium we highlight the strategies of resilience and unique funds of knowledge that immigrant parents have developed which might serve as an inspiration for connected learning initiatives. This symposium will feature five approaches to supporting immigrant parents as connected parents, ranging from exploring the potential of intergenerational parent-children online interactions to articulating the precise role of technology in the information ecology of immigrant parents to methods for designing and deploying assets-based interventions for these parents. We conclude by opening the discussion to the audience about how to expand the vision of connected learning to populations with non-dominant information and technology practices.