Immigrant Parents’ Perspective on Their Children’s School and Education in the Era of COVID-19: A Case of Vietnamese Mothers in South Korea

During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in South Korea were forced to shift from the traditional way of teaching and learning, face-to-face, to online learning. The purpose of this study was to explore how Vietnamese immigrant mothers in South Korea felt about their children’s schools during the COVID-19 pandemic. To do this, the qualitative data collection method, qualitative research interview (QRI), was applied. Six Vietnamese immigrant mothers who had children attending elementary school were interviewed, and Colaizzi’s descriptive phenomenological method (DPM) was used to analyze their stories. The results indicate that the Vietnamese mothers had mixed feelings regarding how schools responded during the pandemic. There did not seem to be technological barriers to their children’s online learning, but the mothers did not indicate that they were satisfied with the online learning provided by their children’s school during the pandemic. They seemed to have low expectations for the online learning environment itself and thought that their children were not getting enough attention from their teachers in the distance-learning environment. In addition, the immigrant mothers did not have enough access to information about their children’s education. They were strongly concerned about the reduction in opportunities to socialize caused by distance learning. These findings imply that establishing a trusting and meaningful relationships to create a healthy school community is more important to Vietnamese immigrant mothers than academic achievement or developing efficient online learning content.