Engage families for anywhere, anytime learning

A common and mistakenly held view is that learning happens only in schools. Consider that U.S. students spend only 6.6 hours at school on each school day, leaving them with ample waking time to explore their interests and enhance their knowledge and skills in out-of-school settings (NCES, 2009). These out-of-school settings are growing and changing so rapidly that communities, including virtual ones, are morphing into the new classroom. As society expects children and youth today to explore content-area topics in depth and to develop critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills, out-of-school spaces are becoming increasingly important to individual learning.

Libraries and museums are reinventing themselves into inviting hubs of youth-generated creativity. After-school programs are expanding their offerings beyond homework assistance to develop resources that draw youth, especially those in middle and high school, to pursue a wide variety of science, technology, and arts interests, civic engagement activities, and college preparatory experiences. Digital media appeal to youth because of the almost unlimited possibilities they offer for producing new forms of creative expression, for acting on social issues, and for connecting and collaborating with others. To remain in touch with their children’s activities, parents are engaging in a variety of previously unexplored pursuits, such as making digital books and joining family-friendly hacker spaces — online community spaces where people interested in computers, technology, digital art, etc. meet and create new works out of existing products.

These shifts mean that our views of family engagement to promote children’s learning and development have to keep pace with a changing environment. It is no longer appropriate or fruitful to focus family engagement solely on what happens in school; we must reimagine this concept within the many opportunities available for anywhere, anytime learning (Lopez & Caspe, 2014; Patton & Caspe, 2014).