Winstanley on Homeschooling Gifted Children

This post reviews Carrie Winstanley, “Too Cool for School? Gifted Children and Homeschooling” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 347-362
Winstanley, Principal Lecturer in Education at Roehampton University in London,  here argues that gifted children form a distinct group of homeschoolers that defy classification schemes usually employed by scholars to describe [...]

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Merry and Howell on How Family Intimacy is a Good Argument for Homeschooling

This post is the first in a series reviewing the recent articles published in the November 2009 issue of Theory and Research in Education.  The article under review is Michael S. Merry and Charles Howell, “Can Intimacy Justify Home Education?”
Merry, professor of philosophy of education at the University of Amsterdam and author of an important [...]

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Marzluf on Homeschoolers in College Writing Courses

This post reviews Philip Marzluf, “Writing Home-Schooled Students into the Academy” in Composition Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 49-66
Marzluf, professor and director of the writing program at Kansas State University, here pens a thoughtful reflection on the challenges that arise in composition courses when conservative Christian homeschoolers enroll in them. 

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Fields-Smith and Williams on Why Black Parents Homeschool

This post reviews Cheryl Fields-Smith and Meca Williams, “Motivations, Sacrifices, and Challenges: Black Parents’ Decisions to Home School” in Urban Review 41 (2009): 369-389
Fields-Smith, a professor at the University of Georgia, and Williams, at Georgia Southern, here offer an important contribution to the literature on parental motivation for homeschooling.  This article is the first to [...]

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Why Parents Choose Cybercharter Schools

This post briefly reviews Rose M. Marsh, Alison A. Carr-Chellman, and Beth R. Stockman, “Selecting Silicon: Why Parents Choose Cybercharter Schools” in TechTrends 53, no. 4 (July 2009): 32-36 [available here]
Carr-Chellman and two of her doctoral students here report the results of interviews they conducted with seven cybercharter parents to find out why conservative homeschoolers [...]

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Kunzman on Christian Homeschoolers, Part 2

This post continues my review of Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling(Boston: Beacon, 2009).
In part one I summarized the book’s contents and offered a few tepid critiques.  Here I’d like to draw out a few generalizations from Kunzman’s rich data about Christian homeschoolers.

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Kunzman on Christian Homeschooling, part 1

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).
Kunzman [see his wonderful homeschooling research website here], Associate Professor of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington and author of many works on religion, ethics, and education, here gives us one of the most important [...]

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Joyce on Patriarchal Homeschooling, Part 3

This post is the final installment of my treatment of Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
In my first post I summarized the book’s content.  In my second post I offered a few critiques and generalizations.  Here I’d like to offer some speculations about the movement’s future, drawing on a few personal experiences in [...]

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Joyce on Patriarchal Homeschooling, Part 2

This post continues my review of Kathryn Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.
In my last post I summarized Joyce’s book.  Here I will offer three criticisms and then try to generalize a bit from her data.  In my next post I’ll offer some predictions for the future of the Patriarchy movement.  First for the critique:

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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 [...]

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