Research On The Present Situation And Influencing Factors Of Migrant Parents’ Educational Participation

Parental involvement in education,as a key element in the collaborative education of the home,school and community,is not only an important issue in education policy,but has also received widespread attention from the public.However,parents are often treated as a homogeneous group in parental education participation studies,and parents are often held to a uniform standard in parental education participation practices,thus neglecting the differences among parents.The migrant worker group is a unique phenomenon in China after the reform and opening up,especially the creation of special economic zones.Due to multiple social factors such as household registration and resources,they are usually marginalized under the discourse system of parental education participation.Therefore,this study takes migrant parents as its target audience to identify the factors affecting their educational participation and to propose strategies for improvement.This study firstly compares the current status of domestic and international research on parental educational participation and the educational participation of disadvantaged parents.Secondly,based on Epstein’s Overlapping Influence Threshold Theory,Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s model of parental involvement in education,and combined with local studies on parental involvement in education in China,a questionnaire was developed to classify parental involvement in education into six levels: parent-child communication,parent-child co-learning,academic counselling,home-school communication,management decision-making and voluntary support,Parental involvement in education was categorized into six levels: parent-child communication,parent-child learning,academic guidance,home-school communication,management decision-making,and voluntary support.Finally,the theme of the study was the educational participation of migrant parents,and a primary school in Shanghai’s P district was selected as the main target group for the study,using a self-administered questionnaire.The main findings of this study include:Firstly,it is about the current situation of migrant parents’ educational participation.Firstly,migrant parents’ understanding of education shows that they are concerned about their children’s natural growth;secondly,migrant parents generally have higher educational expectations of their children;secondly,migrant parents have developed an understanding of shared educational responsibility between home and school;finally,migrant parents’ educational participation shows an emotional participation in the out-of-school field,showing a paradigm of accompanying growth.Secondly,it is about the influencing factors of migrant parents’ educational participation.Migrant parents’ educational participation is influenced by factors such as parental role,economic capital,time capital and cultural capital at the family level,the number of children,children’s achievements and children’s grades at the child level,and the invitation to school,teachers’ attitudes and teachers’ communication experiences at the school level.Among them,factors at the family and child levels mainly influence migrant parents’ educational participation in the out-of-school arena,which also manifests itself in the influence on accompanying growth-oriented participation and achievement-learning participation,while factors at the school level mainly influence migrant parents’ educational participation in the school arena.Thirdly,it is about the strategies to improve the quality of education participation of migrant parents.Based on the findings and discussions,this study concludes that migrant parents’ educational participation is more about helplessness than indifference,that parental educational participation expresses the need to build migrant parents’ capacity,and that the context of lifelong learning implies the developmental potential of migrant parents.As a result,a range of strategies for improvement are proposed.Migrant parents need to explore development paths,i.e.to recognize their role and play an educational role;to build confidence in education and change their role;and to enhance their cultural capital and activate their potential.Schools need to innovate the home-school development model,i.e.break out of misconceptions and uphold the concept of respect and equality;build participation platforms and broaden democratic participation channels;and provide learning guidance to empower migrant parents.The community should establish a service support system,i.e.improve institutional safeguards and build a social support network;coordinate resources from all sides to bring into play the advantages of social education;and provide a vertical perspective to focus on parents’ capacity development.