How edtech should unite Latino families—instead of driving them apart (Brigid Barron's research is cited)

American kids are using more and more media both inside and outside of school. Latino Americans are the largest minority group in the American population. Where do these two facts intersect

Last Friday, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened two panels discussing diverse families’ representation in and usage of media, followed by a design workshop, at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Co-hosted in a partnership between the Cooney Center, Digital Promise, and Stanford's new Technology for Equity in Learning Opportunities (TELOS) initiative, the event promoted the release of the Center’s recent publication: Diverse Families and Media: Using Research to Inspire Design, a free design and research guide developed in conjunction with Sesame Workshop.

One question in particular—“What needs and concerns do diverse families have that designers and educators might not be aware of?”—quickly arose as a theme for the day. The latter of two panels, moderated by Karen Cator, CEO of nonprofit Digital Promise, gravitated towards answering the question in relation to a specific constituency: Latino students and their immigrant families.

Academics Margaret Caspe, Senior Research at Harvard Family Research Project, and Carmen Gonzalez, a professor at University of Washington, joined Eric Cuentos of nonprofit Mission Graduates and Cator to discuss the relationships between Latino families and student use of technology. From that discussion came frank observations of the role reversal that many Latino parents and students experience—as well as fruitful advice for organizations on how to better support those families.

The phenomenon of immigrant children becoming “brokers” of their families’ new culture is well-documented and studied. Children translate phone conversations, documents and even road signs for their parents, which throws traditional family dynamics for a loop—a point that both Cuentos and Gonzalez brought up.

“Kids run into problems with technology where they need their parents, but their parents can’t help them. As kids become more involved with technology, the parents see it as the magnet that pulls the kids away from the family,” said Cuentos. He referred to the new relationship between a parent and his or her broker-child as “asymmetrical acculturation,” where a child becomes accustomed to a new culture faster than a parent.

Read the entire article on the EdSurge website.