Digital Well-Being and Superdigital Citizenship: A Class Comparison of Parenting Practices for Remote Learning

Abstract

Using the pandemic as a natural laboratory for exploring edtech, this study is concerned with the changes in parental involvement that the demands of remote-learning elicited and implications for educational justice across classes. Interviews with 25 middle-class and low-income parents revealed classed practices of parental involvement in remote-learning: middle-class parents espouse a digital well-being approach while low-income parents espouse a superdigital citizenship approach. The former is concerned with maintaining what parents see as a healthy balance between children’s digital activity and school learning; the latter with ensuring children have access to what parents see as varied resources and opportunities for learning and social connection available online and in face-to-face daily interaction, particularly in school. Classed practices of parental involvement reveal that parental involvement is a salient sphere of educational justice particularly in the context of educational technology implementation, and are implicated in issues of cultural and distributive justice.