Parental involvement and migrant children’s elementary education : a case study in Shenzhen China

Abstract

Given the rural-urban dual system in China, migration from rural area to urban area has become a considerable trend since 1979. A volume of studies have focused on the education issues of migrant children while there are few studies exploring migrant parents’ parental involvement in China’s educational context. Therefore, the main purposes of this study are to explore the perception of parental involvement of migrant parents and their ways of involvement and to analyze the factors that influence their parental involvement. To achieve the purposes, this study primarily focused on three research questions: 1) What do migrant parents think about parental involvement and student’s learning in school? 2) How do migrant parents involve in their children’s study both at home and school? 3) What factors influence migrant parents’ parental involvement? Observation data, interview data and archival data were employed in a case school in Shenzhen China. The observation was conducted at homes of six informants after getting approval. Six informants from grade three to grade five were invited to do semistructured interview individually. Three homeroom teachers and six parents were invited in a semi-structured interview respectively. Two levels of archival data from school and class were collected to analyze migrant parents’ parental involvement to address the three research questions. The findings were migrant parents in this research mainly perceived parental involvement as home-based parental involvement. They invested more time and energy on home-based involvement, which were influenced by family factors, school factors and social-cultural factors.