Transition to ICHER Reviews Section Complete

A few minutes ago I published my latest review of some homeschooling literature at the International Center for Home Education Research Reviews Section.  I’ve finally gotten the technology right so that readers who are following my facebook page will automatically receive an update whenever I post a new review.

This may be the final post I make to this particular blog.  If you have somehow stumbled upon this site and would like to read my more recent reviews, this link will take you to the reviews section of ICHER.  Thanks to everyone for many wonderful years of blogging and interacting with readers!

Milton Gaither

New Post on U.S. and Canadian Homeschool Law at ICHER Reviews Section

I’m trying to make the transition from this site to the Reviews section of the International Center for Home Education Research website.  I thought I had set it up so that my readers who have joined my facebook group Homeschooling Research Reviews would be able to get an automatic notification of new posts.  But it didn’t happen the way I hoped it would.  Until I get the technology fixed, I’ll post links here as well.

The new post reviews a fascinating doctoral dissertation about the legislative and legal situation concerning homeschooling both in the United States and Canada.  While the U.S. stuff is pretty familiar to most readers, the Canadian material was, at least to me, completely fresh and very enlightening.  Read the new post here.

 

 

Jennifer Lois’ HOME IS WHERE THE SCHOOL IS, part 2

This is the second of two posts dedicated to Jennifer Lois’ new book Home Is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering(New York University Press, 2013).  In the first, which you can read here, I summarized the contents of the book.  Today I will share some of the thoughts I had as I was reading it.

First, a general comment about the quality of homeschooling scholarship.  Before I published my book in 2008 there was only one really good book on homeschooling in print, Mitchell Stevens’ Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement.  Now there are five.  In addition to Stevens’ and mine, all researchers should read Kunzman’s Write These Laws on Your Children, Murphy’s Homeschooling in America, and now Lois’ Home Is Where the School Is.  The field is in a much better place now than it was when I first got started, and Lois’ book adds significantly to our overall understanding.  Here I’m going to discuss two insights I found particularly compelling and conclude with a few criticisms.

Jennifer Lois’ HOME IS WHERE THE SCHOOL IS, part 1

This is the first of two posts dedicated to Jennifer Lois’ new book Home Is Where the School Is: The Logic of Homeschooling and the Emotional Labor of Mothering(New York University Press, 2013).

Lois, a sociology professor at Western Washington University, has published two articles on the subject of the emotional lives of homeschooling mothers that I reviewed here and here.  Twelve years in the making, this book represents the culmination of this line of research for her.  Oftentimes the articles that are published prior to books contain most of what the researcher has to say.  That is happily not the case here.  The book contains a wealth of new findings and interpretations.  In this first post I’ll summarize the book’s contents, and next week I’ll make some comments about Lois’ methods, findings, and interpretations.

Joseph Murphy Reviews Gaither and Kunzman’s “Comprehensive Survey of the Research”

A few months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book that synthesizes nearly all of the literature on homeschooling into a convenient, coherent, and literate volume titled Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement.  A couple of years before Dr. Murphy’s book came out Rob Kunzman and I decided that we wanted to do the same thing.  I’ve been reviewing homeschooling literature since 2008 on this blog, and Dr. Kunzman has compiled an exhaustive bibliography, which can be accessed here.  Our article summarizing and synthesizing all of this literature came out a few weeks ago and I asked Dr. Murphy if he would review it for me.  He graciously agreed to do so, and here are his comments:

Gretchen Abernathy Reviews in English a Spanish Language Article about Homeschooling in Spain

This week again I have asked a guest to review for me.  In this case it was because the article is written in Spanish.  Thankfully, my sister Gretchen Abernathy is a professional translator with many years of experience translating Spanish language theological scholarship into English.  Here follows her expert summary and evaluation of a recent piece by three scholars from Spain.  I have again cross-posted this review on the ICHER website.  I’m encouraging my readers to familiarize themselves now with that site, for soon I’ll be moving over to it exclusively.

Record: Elizalde, M., Urpí, C., and Tejada, M., “Diversidad, participación y calidad educativas: necesidades y posibilidades del Homeschooling”[“Diversity, Parent Involvement and Quality Education: Needs and Possibilities of Homeschooling”], in Estudios sobre educación, vol. 22 (2012), pp. 55-72. [Available here]

María Ángeles Sotés Elizalde, Universidad de Navarrra

Carme Urpí, Universidad de Navarra

María del Coro Molinos Tejada, Universidad de Navarra

Summary: Elizalde, Urpí and Tejada, all representing the Universidad de Navarra in Spain, discuss in very general strokes the phenomenon of homeschooling in Spain and in a few other select countries, evaluating the issues of diversity, parental involvement and quality therein. Starting from the basic premise that education is necessary for children, especially in countries where millions of children and girls in particular have no access to basic formal education, they observe the irony that as baseline literacy needs are met in environments of material abundance, other problems arise: discipline, lack of motivation and mistreatment among students. The authors suggest that, given the transition from precarious to prosperous formal education in developed countries, the time is ripe to evaluate how homeschooling offers a positive pedagogical response and alternative that should be awarded legal credence and greater public acceptance.

Cheryl Fields-Smith Reviews a New Article on African American Homeschooling

As I just noted in my previous post, I am now cross-posting reviews both here and at the International Center for Home Education Research (ICHER) Reviews section.  Eventually I’ll move completely over to the ICHER site and stop updating here.  But for now I’m still posting in both locations.

Today’s post was written not by me but by my esteemed colleague Cheryl Fields-Smith, whose pathbreaking work on African-American homeschoolers I reviewed here.  Given her expertise, I asked her to review this new article by Mazama and Lundy on African American homeschooling.  Here is her review: