All in one group: Current practices, lessons and challenges of chinese home-school communication in im group chat

Abstract

When schools and families form a good partnership, children beneft. With the recent fourishing 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 diferent channels available. While there are defnite 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 afect Chinese teachers' authoritative fgures, afect Chinese teacher's work-life balance and potentially compromise Chinese students' privacy.