Abstract:

The covid-19 pandemic shifted teaching in many countries into virtual space. Students met their teachers only either in alternating classes or entirely at a distance. For many countries, digital learning was already a natural part of school culture before the pandemic. Furthermore, beyond international comparisons, there are always significant differences within each country and its schools. (However, teachers in Germany have used digital media more sparingly than their colleagues internationally (Eickelmann et al. 2018), according to the comparative IAE study ICILS (Fraillon et al. 2018).

In a qualitative study with several lower secondary school classes, we wanted to know how parents experience and assess this digitally supported learning situation and which potentials and risks they perceive in teaching with digital media. We observed digitally skilled and didactically trained classes and those whose teachers organized their digital lessons on their own and reverted to more traditional forms of learning. A semi-standardized questionnaire interviewed all parents from two comprehensive school grades in a medium-sized city. The selection of flanking, in-depth interviews were compiled with maximum heterogeneity. The results show a clear - albeit at first glance perplexing and ambivalent - picture: parents assess digital media literacy as a necessary competence for their children, but they reproduce stereotypically and collectively discussed risks and dangers.

On the one hand, they emphasize a supposed "analogue authenticity" of the traditionally rather media-poor school lessons; on the other hand, they recognize many potentials in the digital lessons necessary. The differentiation of their arguments is higher in the positive area of potentials than in the negative area of risks. However, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what digital literacy is worth and how teachers value it. "Meaningful social practices" (Iivari, Sharma & Vantä-Olkkonen 2020) related to digital skills seem difficult for parents to define. The results provide exciting references to the assessments of the risks and potentials of digital media, as they were surveyed among teachers in the IAE study. Internationally, the view of the parents offers the opportunity to supplement the previous learning space school, as it is depicted in DigCompEdu (Redecker/Punie 2017) in the perspectives of the teachers, the teaching field, and the students, with another perspective, which often also plays a role in the planning of the teachers (Rahayu/Haningsih 2021). Teachers reflect the assumed expectations that parents have of their teaching (Werner et al. 2020). A comparison with the actual and, under the conditions of the pandemic, modified parental expectations for working with digital media can thus have a retroactive influence on teachers' attitudes and expectations after the Corona pandemic and make digital literacy a desirable set of competencies even in previously more digitally sceptical countries.

Keywords:

Digital literacy, digital competencies, distance learning, parental beliefs.