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.

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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.

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How Homeschooling Mothers Deal with the Time Crunch

This post reviews Jennifer Lois, “The Temporal Emotion Work of Motherhood: Homeschoolers’ Strategies for Managing Time Shortage” in Gender and Society, 24, no. 4 (August 2010): 421-446.

Lois, about whom I’ve written before (in one of my most popular posts since it contains the provocative heading “deviant homeschooling moms“)  here gives us another fascinating look at some of the struggles homeschooling mothers go through.

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“The Pioneer Woman” and Homeschooling

This post reviews Amanda Fortini, “O Pioneer Woman!” in The New Yorker, 87 (May 9, 2011), pp. 26-31. [Abstract available here]

Fortini, a frequent contributor to several popular publications on topics ranging from celebrity fashion to politics, here pens a fascinating portrait of Ree Drummond, the famous blogger “The Pioneer Woman.”  

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Laura Brodie on Short-Term Homeschooling

This post reviews Laura Brodie, Love in a Time of Homeschooling: A Mother and Daughter’s Uncommon Year
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

Brodie, mother of three, part-time English professor at Washington and Lee, and author of other works of fiction and nonfiction, here offers a memoir of her one-year experiment in homeschooling with her eldest daughter Julia.  Brodie also has a blog on short-term homeschooling that has dealt a lot with school bullying as motivator for homeschooling.

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Joyce on Patriarchal Homeschooling, Part 1

This post reviews Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

Joyce, a freelance journalist based in New York City, here pens an important book on one of the most dynamic subcultures within the homeschooling world: “quiverfull” families where father is patriarchal lord, mother is submissive breeder of as many children as God provides, sons are trained to be arrows used in battle against secularism, and daughters are given a sex-specific home education to prepare them to be obedient wives and dutiful mothers. 

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Lois on Deviant Homeschooling Moms

This post reviews Jennifer Lois, “Emotionally Layered Accounts: Homeschoolers’ Justifications for Maternal Deviance” in Deviant Behavior 30, no. 2 (February 2009): 201-234

Lois, a sociology professor at Western Washington University, here investigates how homeschooling mothers deal with criticisms of their actions. 

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Sun on Chinese-American Christian Homeschoolers

This post reviews Laura Li-Hua Sun, “Dare to Home School: Faith and Cultural Experiences of Chinese Christian Mothers” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Biola University, 2007). [Link to dissertation here]

Sun begins by explaining how important formal education is to the Chinese, who see it as a means of maintaining their privileged status as “children of the dragon” over other people groups.  Yet despite this powerful cultural tradition, some Chinese Christian mothers are choosing homeschooling.  Why? 

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Stroobant on Homeschooling School-Resistant Children

This post reviews Emma Stroobant, “Dancing to the Music of Your Heart: Home Schooling the School-Resistant Child” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Auckland, 2006).  (Available fulltext here)

Stroobant, a doctoral candidate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, here offers as her Ph.D. thesis a challenge to the dominant medical model that pathologizes the phenomenon of “school resistance”–the overwhelming fear of school and refusal to attend by some children.  Rather than medicating such children and forcing them to attend school, Stroobant looks at homeschooling as an alternative therapy. 

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SmithBattle on Homeschooled Teen Mothers

This post reviews Lee SmithBattle, “‘I Wanna Have a Good Future:’ Teen Mothers’ Rise in Educational Aspirations, Competing Demands, and Limited School Support.” in Youth and Society 38, no. 3 (March 2007): 348-371.

SmithBattle, a professor at the St. Louis University School of Nursing, here describes how pregnancy and childbirth often serve as motivators for young teens to raise their educational aspirations. 

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