Digital contexts mediated communication between teachers and parents: a transversal research in a multicultural school

Abstract

Mailing lists, social networks and group chats have become the stage of a very wide spectrum of formal and informal relationship dynamics where conflicts, discussions and misunderstandings are very common. Parents, school administrators and teachers experience situations which are often difficult to manage and where the boundaries between the private and the professional sphere are shady and often crossed. These complex dynamics, even more, complicated if one considers that schools are benefitted from families from different cultural backgrounds, are extremely difficult to investigate because they take place in border-lined spaces which often escape from the gaze of the school policies of the regulations and scientific debate. The research hereby presented, which has been in development for 18 months in a school institute in the metropolitan city of Bologna connoted by a very high degree of multicultural presence, aims to investigate how communicative exchanges mediated by digital contexts are able to influence the relational dynamics between teachers-teachers and parents-teachers.