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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology
• Parents-school relations
• Parental participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. WhatsApp is a cross-platform instant messaging application for smart phones. It enables users to share location information, contacts, images, video, audio, and text messages in real-time with individuals and groups at no cost. It is an extremely popular application in many countries, especially in Israel – as discussed in the Theoretical Background section on social media, below.

2. The five sectors include: public Jewish secular schools, public Jewish religious schools, ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools, Kibbutz schools, and public Arab schools. This study focuses on public Jewish secular and Arab schools.

3. Israeli schools traditionally request that children wear white T-shirts on days of national ceremonies or special school events.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Audrey Addi-Raccah

Audrey Addi-Raccah (Ph.D.) is an associate professor at Tel-Aviv University. Her main interests are in social inequality and stratification and educational administration. Her current studies focus on power relations within the school and between school and its environment. Within this scope, parents–teachers relations within different social contexts stand at the center of her research.

Miri Yemini

Miri Yemini (Ph.D.) is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University. Her research addresses internationalization and globalization in education, social entrepreneurship, and inequality