Breaking Routines: The Lived Experiences of Solo Parents Navigating Modular Distance Learning in the Philippines

Abstract

Key stakeholders in education sector are enablers of sustainable development. Their collective action significantly influences human resources and the overall quality of education. Accordingly, solo parents as stakeholders in the field of education have multidimensional impact in the community, explicitly on learners’ academic achievements. In this phenomenological study, the researchers aimed to explore the lived experiences of solo parents, specifically the challenges that they have experienced and the coping strategies that they capitalized when they used the Modular Distance Learning (MDL) modality to carry out their roles as parent-educators of their youngsters. The researchers conducted face-to-face interview using the semi-structured interview guide to achieve the objectives of the study. The results of the study are useful to education stakeholders, especially to the teachers and school officials concerned, for them to better understand the lived experiences of the solo parents, and address the challenges, thus—afford better education to learners. The findings of the study revealed that solo parents, as parent-educators, have faced many challenges when they used the MDL modality. Specifically, they have experienced pedagogical, personal and educational, and limited parent-youngster teaching-learning interaction challenges. To moderate the effects of these challenges, they used these coping strategies: help seeking behavior, parent-teacher influence, and parental involvement in education. Undoubtedly, solo parents, as parent-educators face many challenges, which can affect their teaching performance in the MDL context. However, with a dynamic teaching-learning partnership among solo parents and their youngsters an improved teaching-learning performance is assured.