Abstract
Although schools are a primary focus of education research, we have long known that families are equally critical in supporting children’s learning. However, many existing studies put families in situations that share little resemblance to what family learning looks like outside of school. These limitations undermine both the quality of the research and our commitments to equity. Based on our experiences during the global health pandemic, we reflect on these limitations and offer thoughts to motivate a new vision of family learning research. Among other things, the process revealed the power of allowing families to choose how and when they engage in learning experiences together and finding ways to capture more authentic family configurations beyond the parent-child dyad.
Keywords
Es muy bonito pasar el tiempo con los hijos en la casa aprendiendo juntos. Y lo especial para mí fue que yo lo pude hacer con mis hijos a pesar de que hay tantas cosas que hacer, pero se hace el tiempo para estar con ellos y enseñarles de nosotros. [It’s wonderful to spend time at home with the kids learning together. And it was special for me because I was able to do it with my kids despite everything that’s going on—to take the time to be with them and teach them about us.]
Although schools are the primary focus of most education research studies, we have long known that families are equally critical in supporting children’s learning, development, and long-term well-being (National Association of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2016; National Research Council [NRC], 2000)—a fact that has been starkly highlighted during the global health pandemic that began in 2019 (Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 2021; Ladson-Billings, 2021). There is a long tradition of family learning research within and beyond the education field. Yet many existing studies, especially in the early childhood realm in which we work, put parents and children in unnatural situations, such as clinical laboratories or highly structured research tasks during home visits. Studies also typically focus on the parent-child dyad—and almost always, the mother-child dyad—leaving out the broader family system, including fathers, siblings, other caregivers, and extended family and friends (Broderick, 1993; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2007; Herron & Jamieson, 2020). These situations likely share little resemblance to what family learning looks like at home. Arguably, even the literature on family learning outside of school (Haden et al., 2014; NRC, 2009) has primarily focused on family interactions in designed learning spaces, such as museums or science centers, which represent only a small fraction of ways that families learn together. Furthermore, most studies place researcher priorities, such as controlling variables and ensuring consistency across groups, above the needs, goals, and values of families (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022; Philip et al., 2018).
We argue these limitations undermine both the quality of the research and the overall values of equity underlying our work with families. From an equity perspective, these approaches perpetuate existing power inequities between researchers and families and consequentially, the disparities and injustices embedded within our education system (Ishimaru, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2007; McWayne et al., 2022). From a research perspective, traditional approaches distort our view of families, the unique ways they learn together, and the rich assets they bring to education and learning. These approaches overlay hidden cultural assumptions about what parenting and more broadly, family learning can and should look like, such as the focus on didactic teaching approaches and emphasis on the role of a single caregiver versus broader family- or community-based models of childrearing (Rogoff, 2014; Scheidecker et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2021). And they perpetuate deficit-based perspectives on communities and families. By placing families in unnatural or unfamiliar contexts, removing them from their typical family configurations and structures, denying them choice or agency in the research process, and putting them through tasks that have little cultural relevance, we are undermining and obscuring the rich funds of knowledge (González et al., 2005) and cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) that they bring to supporting their children’s learning and development.
In this article, we use our experiences conducting research collaboratively with families during the global health pandemic to reflect on these limitations and offer thoughts to motivate a new vision of family learning research. Like most education researchers, the pandemic forced us to not only adapt our research methods but also reflect deeply on the assumptions and approaches that have guided our “business as usual” studies (Ladson-Billings, 2021; Takeuchi et al., 2021). Abandoning our typical methods, we shifted to a home-based, family-centered approach to video recording and reflecting on family learning interactions. This, in turn, highlighted both the limitations of our previous approaches and the powerful opportunities that arise when families have more control over when, how, and with whom they engage in learning.
To begin, we briefly describe the research context and parent conversations that motivated these reflections. We then use this context to explore the potential of developing a new vision of family research that we argue is relevant across the education research field.
Using Zoom to Study Family Learning at Home
My son was having a rough time the first time I wanted to do the activity, so we waited until he was ready. I like the flexibility of the Zoom for when the kid is at a good spot to learn. (Parent study participant)
The reflections outlined in this article were inspired by two National Science Foundation-funded projects: Head Start on Engineering (HSE; Pattison et al., 2020) and Ready, Set, Go! Engineering (RSG Engineering; Pattison, Svarovsky, et al., 2022; Wagner et al., 2023). Both were collaborations with low-income, Spanish- and English-speaking families focused on supporting and studying the ways that families with preschool-age children engage with engineering design and how these experiences build long-term pathways of STEM-related engagement and interest development.
A primary goal for both projects was to document naturalistic family interactions with playful engineering design activities. Both projects provided hands-on materials and engineering design challenges inspired by storybooks and designed to support collaborative explorations with children and adults. For example, one of the activities was based on the popular Spanish children’s song, Los Pollitos Dicen (The Baby Chicks Are Singing), and challenged families to use colorful blocks and cardboard pieces to build houses for a group of stuffed baby chickens. Across studies, we observed children and parents engaging in rich engineering design practices as they built structures for the chicks, talked about ways to keep them safe and cozy, and expanded on the original challenge in playful and creative ways (Pattison, Svarovsky, et al., 2022; Wagner et al., 2023). In a different activity, families practiced process engineering (i.e., designing a process to solve a problem) as they planned how they would prepare and serve tacos for friends and family. All the activities were bilingual (Spanish/English) and codeveloped with educators and community partners. For both projects, the activity kits included a one-page bilingual activity guide, a storybook, and all the materials needed for the design challenge.
For HSE, the process of capturing family interactions with these activities was originally intended as part of regular home visits with participating families. For RSG Engineering, video was to be captured during parent-child interaction groups at our partner community organization. Unfortunately, the pandemic made both approaches impossible. Instead, we needed a way to remotely record family interactions with activities that were delivered to their homes. The new method needed to be accessible for families, be adaptable to a variety of Internet and technology configurations, and allow for the transfer of potentially large video files (e.g., 15–90 minutes).
Although we explored a variety of options, including providing recording devices to families, both projects ultimately adopted a Zoom-based video recording system. Using the standard Zoom videoconferencing software, we assigned a unique license for each family. We then created reoccurring meeting links that were open whenever any participant used the link and were set to automatically record video and audio to a cloud-based server. In other words, families could initiate virtual meetings on their phones or computers at any time as many times as they wanted using their unique Zoom link without a researcher needing to be present. Once the family completed their recording, they closed the Zoom meeting, and the audio and video recordings were automatically uploaded to a folder accessible only to the research team.
Both projects embedded the recording system in a similar way, beginning with a virtual orientation meeting and detailed instructions about the protocol and Zoom recording system. Each family was then assigned a researcher liaison who maintained regular communication with participants and guided them through the research process. For RSG Engineering, each family received three different engineering activities delivered to their home over the course of about 5 months. They were instructed to use their unique Zoom link to record themselves and their child the first time they opened each activity kit. The research liaison confirmed that they had received the recording and scheduled a follow-up phone or videoconference interview to gather the parent or adult caregiver’s feedback from that round. HSE followed a similar protocol, although the video recording process was embedded within a larger set of program experiences and data collection activities, including online parent meetings and ongoing parent interviews (for a summary of video data collection, see Table 1).
Overview of Video Recordings by Project
Note. For Head Start on Engineering, five families submitted all three videos, three families submitted two, one family submitted one, and one family submitted none. A few families submitted more than one video for the same activity. For Ready, Set, Go! Engineering, 15 families submitted all three videos and one family dropped out of the study after submitting the first video.
At the end of the year, we gathered feedback from families through virtual, semistructured interviews about their experience using the Zoom video recording system. Most parents reported that the system was easy to use and that they were comfortable recording themselves and their families at home. Across the two studies, the majority of participants (64%) also indicated that they would prefer the Zoom-based recording system if they were involved in a similar study in the future. 1 More revealing, however, were the rich conversations with families about their preferences and reflections, including the reasons that parents provided for choosing one option over the other (Table 2). These conversations motivated us to reflect on the trade-offs inherent to this approach and the implications of these trade-offs for family-centered research more broadly.
Primary Categories of Parent Feedback About Recording Approach
Note. Each parent response could be categorized under more than one category.
Reflecting on Approaches to Studying Family Learning
The most meaningful thing that we learned was collaboration. I appreciate that lesson. Sometimes we struggle—they all have their own things they tend to fuss amongst each other when they have a play activity. This has allowed us to work together and use each other’s ideas. (Parent study participant)
Challenges and Constraints
Reflecting on the Zoom-based video recording method, we clearly had less control over the quality of the data because families used their own phones to record the interactions. In some cases, the video was as good or better than we had previously captured using research-grade equipment operated by a researcher in families’ homes. In other cases, however, the recording quality was lower. Primary challenges included low or unreliable Internet and poor Zoom video capture; phones positioned too far or too close, resulting in low audio quality or missed interaction details; and interference from background noise (e.g., a TV left on during recording). Because Zoom is designed to adapt to Internet speed and reliability, there were times when video briefly cut out, the video and audio were out of sync, or data quality was temporarily reduced. A few families mentioned challenges with the Zoom technology in our conversations, and in a small number of cases, families forgot to turn on either the video or audio during the interactions.
We also had less control over how likely families were to record and when they completed data collection. In the past, our typical protocol was to schedule home visits or on-site data collection appointments. Although scheduling was often difficult and families occasionally canceled at the last minute, the in-person meetings provided a concrete deadline for everyone. In contrast, the Zoom-based video recording put families in control of when the recordings were captured. We provided reminders, deadlines, and incentives, but ultimately, it was up to the families to complete each phase of data collection. In RSG Engineering, we were able to gather almost a complete data set across the 16 families (Table 1). We attribute this success to the strong relationship families had with our community organization partner, the focused nature of the study, and the close link between video recording assignment and follow-up interview. For HSE, the percentage of completed video recordings was lower. In this case, the video data collection was part of a larger and more complex set of program and research activities, which may have overwhelmed families and made it more difficult to focus on completing the video recordings. We also believe that families in HSE potentially faced additional life challenges during the study, such as loss of childcare or family health issues.
Powerful Potential
Despite the challenges, our experience with the Zoom-based video recording system opened our eyes to the many benefits of adopting a family-centered data collection approach. Across both projects, almost half of families talked about how recording with their own phone felt more comfortable and led to more natural and relaxed family interactions. Some parents mentioned that their children would feel awkward with a stranger visiting their home and recording. For example, one mother felt that Zoom “works really well. It’s comfortable from your own phone. So, it’s familiar to the kids. They won’t get intimidated by a big camera or people they don’t know.”
Many parents also appreciated how the Zoom system allowed them to choose the time and place for the recording that was best for them. Depending on the family, this might mean avoiding moments when their children were hungry or tired, picking a time that worked for all family members (including partners and spouses), or switching to a different location when one space was too distracting. As one parent noted, “Me gusta porque muchas veces los niños no están de buen humor. Están cansados o no quieren hacer la actividad. Con Zoom es más flexible hacerlo cuando ellos están en su momento.” [I like it because many times the kids are in a bad mood. They’re tired or they don’t want to do the activity. With Zoom, we have the flexibility to do it when they’re ready.] Several families mentioned how they started recording, realized that it was not going to work, and then tried again later. In our own research, we have repeatedly heard from families that spending time together is a core value and a strong motivator for participating in studies or programs that support the involvement of multiple family members (Pattison et al., 2020; Pattison, Ramos Montañez, & Svarovsky, 2022). Many families took advantage of the flexible Zoom recording system to find times that worked for everyone—sometimes even recording later in the evening when sibling, spouses, and partners were available to participate.
This flexibility has important implications for research. In essence, families were able to control for extraneous factors that may have distorted the research findings, such as distractions or bad moods. From an equity perspective, this approach allowed families to put their best foot forward, showing their full range of knowledge and skills—including tailoring activities to the needs and interests of children, supporting learning for multiple family members, and connecting activities with children’s prior experiences and knowledge (Callanan et al., 2020; NASEM, 2016; Takeuchi et al., 2019). As noted, many research studies place families, especially families of color from low-income communities, in contexts or situations that are uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or culturally incongruent. For example, a study might ask a parent to bring their child to a location they have never been before, talk to individuals with very different cultural backgrounds in a language they rarely use, and engage with an activity or task that is divorced from the types of learning experiences in that family’s everyday lives. These situations undermine family strengths and cultural assets, perpetuating deficit-based perspectives (Ladson-Billings, 2007). In contrast, asset- and strength-based approaches actively seek to identify, highlight, and amplify the existing strengths of families (González et al., 2005; Ramos Montañez, 2023; Yosso, 2005). Allowing families more choice and control of how and when the data collection takes place, therefore, may be a powerful approach for empowering families to share their strengths and communicate a more inclusive vision of how parents and children learn together.
In the same way, the flexible home-based recording format also captured a diverse range of family configurations that is likely more representative of the ways that families learn together compared to the parent-child dyad that is the typical focus of research, especially in early childhood. In RSG Engineering, of the 46 videos captured, nine involved more than one adult, and 20 involved more than one child, including both older and younger siblings and, in a few cases, friends and extended relatives. For HSE, the proportion of videos with more than one adult was similar, but the number of interactions with more than one child was larger: 16 of the 24 videos featured more than one child, including seven videos with three or more children. These were choices that families made themselves, either based on necessity or preference. Given what we have heard about the value of spending time together, we suspect that more families would have involved other adults and children in the experiences if we had provided a more explicit invitation (Pattison, Ramos Montañez, & Svarovsky, 2022).
The involvement of other family members provided a richer, more complex, and we argue, more realistic vision of family learning than is typically captured in research studies. We observed parents skillfully managing the involvement of siblings and tailoring the activities to the interests and abilities of different ages. We saw spouses and partners playing complementary roles or helping to manage the involvement of multiple children. We watched as adults quickly pivoted throughout the interactions to take advantage of different learning moments or pursue new learning goals beyond engineering, such as recognizing colors, practicing reading, or supporting socioemotional skills. In cases with multiple children, we saw younger siblings following the lead of older children and older siblings helping to facilitate the experience for the family, such as reading activity instructions or assisting siblings with the materials.
For example, in RSG Engineering, one mother facilitated the Pollitos Dicen activity with her three kids: a 5-year-old daughter who was enrolled in the early childhood program and an older son and younger daughter who were approximately 9 and 3, respectively. At the outset of the interaction, the mother began by distributing the materials to the three children, giving them time to explore, and reading the instructions out loud. The mother and son took turns reading the instructions in Spanish and English and figuring out together how to proceed. As the family began the design challenge, the mother worked on her own design but also helped each child engage in a way that seemed responsive to their abilities and interests—in this case, the youngest daughter stacking only the yellow blocks; the middle daughter creating a hotel, backyard, and swimming pool for the chickens; and the son working on a complex, multistory tower. The siblings occasionally argued, but they also shared ideas with each other, and the son often provided ideas and guidance for his sisters in parallel with his mom. Throughout, the mother appeared to use the activity to support other goals, such as encouraging her son to practice Spanish and helping all three children work together and share materials. She also indicated that she valued the time spent with her three children and the opportunity to support multiple learning goals: En las actividades lo que nos gustó era que no solamente era para ellos, sino que me incluyeron también a mí y eso es lo que les divirtió a ellos también. . . . También les ayudó a leer en español a mi hijo. . . . Es fácil para ellos hablar inglés, pero no es lo mismo en español.[What we liked most about the activities was that they weren’t just for the kids but that they included me, as well. This was really fun. . . . Also, they helped my son with his Spanish reading. . . . It’s easy for them to talk in English, but it’s not the same in Spanish.]
Group configurations like these may allow families to demonstrate a much broader range of learning practices than we typically see with one adult and one child. Research with families has highlighted multiage, multigeneration group interactions as a hallmark of learning outside of school (Callanan et al., 2012; NRC, 2009; Rogoff et al., 2016). These interactions are unique in the ways that families manage the learning needs of multiple family members, tailor experiences to different abilities and interests, support cooperative learning among children and adults of different ages, and pursue broader family goals, such as relationship and identify development (Pattison & Dierking, 2013; Pattison & Ramos Montañez, 2021; Rogoff et al., 2016). In this way, the flexibility of the Zoom-based system may support the ongoing move toward a more inclusive understanding of education beyond the classroom.
Conclusion
Our experience working with families during the global health pandemic has not only forced us to adapt our methods but has also motivated deep reflection about our work with families and our underlying approaches to equitable education and research (Borrero et al., 2022; Pattison, Ramos Montañez, Svarovsky, & Tominey, 2022). The experience has helped us learn from families and provide them with more choice and agency as research participants. And it has revealed the powerful potential of adopting more family-centered research approaches—both for creating accessible, comfortable, and rewarding experiences for participants and for producing more valid, generalizable, and actionable research findings.
Moving forward, the Zoom-based recording system described in this article shows promise for supporting more family-centered research, but many challenges remain. Several families indicated that they were confused by aspects of the Zoom application, such as knowing whether the recording was working, and some families had trouble keeping their children from reacting to the presence of the phone (Table 2). From a family-centered perspective, it is important for researchers to provide tools and support that help families feel comfortable and empower them to make choices about their participation throughout the research process. In this study, we gauged families’ familiarity with Zoom during recruitment, provided training videos, and maintained regular contact with participants throughout the process. In the future, we are interested in exploring other tools that further streamline the recording process, integrate with familiar technologies, and help parents create comfortable learning experiences at home. We are also aware of the potential ethical issues inherent with this approach and other new technologies, including ensuring the privacy of data stored on a third-party platform and the potential for individuals, especially in the context of the home, to be recorded without having participated in informed consent.
In addition to addressing technological and ethical challenges, we see opportunities to leverage these types of studies to democratize how data are used and the value of the experiences for families themselves. Traditionally, there is a strong power hierarchy between researchers and family participants, with researchers determining the focus of studies, collecting data without sharing back to communities, and limiting opportunities for families to provide input, reflect on their experiences, or learn from other participants (Barajas-López & Ishimaru, 2020; Ishimaru & Bang, 2022). In recent work, we asked families to text us photos and reflections of their learning experiences with home-based engineering activities, and we subsequently posted (with permission) these photos and reflections on a private website visible to all families participating in the study. Many families reported that they found this website extremely valuable for developing a sense of community, learning from the experiences of others, and motivating ongoing interactions with their children. Although the texted photos were a different type of data compared to the videos, we found the approach not only provided deep insights about home-based family learning but also positioned families as central stakeholders in a broader community of inquiry. As before, it also raised important ethical considerations related to how research data are shared and how we protect research participants even as we push the boundaries of methods and technologies.
Building on these technology-based data collection methods, we are interested in seeing the research community explore other approaches that support the authentic learning experiences of families, disrupt the power hierarchies of traditional research, and center family goals, values, and perspectives. Zoom-based video recording is one way of moving in this direction, but it is not the only approach. Several parents in our studies noted the benefits of in-person home visits, such as families and researchers learning from each other (Table 2). These comments suggest a need to develop methods that provide families both agency in the data collection process and support in-person connections and shared learning. We are particularly interested in dialogic approaches through which researchers engage in ongoing discussions with parents and families to center family voices, collaboratively identify research priorities, and codevelop solutions for transforming educational systems (Bang et al., 2016; Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016; Ishimaru et al., 2018; Quintos et al., 2019). These approaches can build a level of trust and rapport with families that creates space for bidirectional learning with researchers and allows participants to more authentically share their experiences, perspectives, and strengths. Perhaps most importantly, such collaborative approaches can motivate us as educators and researchers to reflect deeply on our own assumptions, values, and methods that continue to serve as a central barrier to creating a more equitable education system for all communities.
