What is up? Parental Whatsapp discussion groups in diverse educational settings in Israel

We explore and characterize the use of WhatsApp group instant messaging as part of the social media trend in the context of parental engagement and participation in public schooling. We reveal how this platform is utilized within public school parental interactions, emphasizing the possible benefits as well as obstacles for such technologies in promoting parental engagement in diverse settings in Israel. Given the abundance of literature dealing with parental involvement in education in various cultural and socio-economic contexts, we propose a fresh outlook regarding one specific kind of such involvement through a social media platform, offering a novel methodology and proposing a new avenue of study for additional research in other contexts.

The study (Addi-Raccah & Yemini, 2018) revealed that through WhatsApp, parents may develop a sense of community based on common concerns. Parents are not left to cope with their children’s education on their own (as traditional parent-school relations often dictate); rather, they can engage with others to attain greater power and support in addressing their particular concerns. the social context within which these conversations are developed, there was found no substantial differences between the parent group chats at schools serving populations of low and high SES. We did identify differences between Arab groups and Jewish ones; namely, initiatives concerning radical transformations in school and specific complaints regarding particular teachers or children were found in the Jewish groups but not in the Arab ones. WhatsApp seems to be utilized as a platform for active parenting. Notably, all parents in this study, regardless of their ethnic or socio-economic backgrounds, are concerned with similar issues regarding the quality of the educational services their children’s school provides.