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.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

My New Article that Reviews ALL the Homeschooling Research

The journal Other Education has just published an article Rob Kunzman and I wrote together titled, “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research.”  It is the culmination of years of work by both of us compiling every piece of research on homeschooling ever written, culling through them all to select the best material, organizing them into coherent categories, and writing up the results.

Several months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, which is a very thorough review of the scholarly literature.  Our article is not nearly so long as Dr. Murphy’s book and thus it lacks some of the detail he provides.  Anyone interested in homeschooling research should read his book cover to cover and keep it on the shelf for frequent reference.  But despite its length and depth of coverage, there are some topics and a few key studies Dr. Murphy leaves out, and he sometimes fails to differentiate between high and low quality studies or between studies published recently and those published decades ago.  I think our article provides even more breadth and does a better job discriminating between sources.  Plus you can download it for free!  Do so here.

Read Full Post »

Why do Conservative Catholics and Muslims Homeschool?

This post reviews Jeff Humason, “Homeschoolers on Homeschooling: In Their Own Words” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toledo, 2012) [available here]

Humason, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toledo with experience both as a public school teacher/administrator and as a Catholic homeschooling father of six (one of whom attends a public school), here presents the results of a series of interviews he conducted with several homeschooling parents to ascertain why they do what they do.

Read Full Post »

School Refusal and Homeschooling

This post reviews Alan Thomas and Allison Wray, “School Refusal and Home Education” in Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning 7, no. 13 (2013).[Available Here]

Thomas, a well-known authority on home education in Britain and Visiting Fellow at the University of London Institute of Education, and Wray, graduate student at Cambridge University and mother of three children, two of whom had refused school, here present the results of a recent study of twenty-four children who had refused to attend school and whose families turned to home-based learning as an alternative.

Read Full Post »

Why do South Dakota Parents Homeschool?

This post reviews Bonnie F. Boschee and Floyd Boschee, “A Profile of Homeschooling in South Dakota” in Journal of School Choice: Research, Theory, and Reform 5, no. 3 (2011): 281-299.

Floyd Boschee, emeritus professor of education at University of South Dakota, and Bonnie Boschee, assistant professor of education at Northern State University, here present the results of a survey of South Dakota homeschooling parents concerning their motivations for doing so.

Read Full Post »

What Iowa Homeschoolers are Doing

This post reviews Tina Marie Jorgenson, “Homeschooling in Iowa: An Investigation of Curricular Choices Made by Homeschooling Parents” (Ph.D. Diss.: University of Iowa, 2011). [Available here]

This doctoral dissertation uses data compiled from Form A of the Competent Private Instruction Report, which the state of Iowa requires all independently homeschooling parents to fill out.  From this data she was able to get a pretty good sense of what kind of Iowans homeschool, what curriculum they use, and why they do what they do.

Read Full Post »

One of the Best Articles on Homeschooling Ever

This post reviews Linda G. Hanna, “Homeschooling Education: Longitudinal Study of Methods, Materials, and Curricula” in Education and Urban Society 20, no. 10 (2012): 1-23.

Hanna, an education professor at West Chester University, here gives us the results of a study of 225 homeschooling families coming from 25 school districts in Pennsylvania to get representative data on who chooses to homeschool, why they choose it, and how they do it.  She surveyed and interviewed these families in 1998 and then went back to them 10 years later for another round of questions.  Thus we have here one of the only longitudinal studies of homeschooling ever done.

Read Full Post »

Are There Differences between Homeschool and Public School Parents, and between their Children?

This post reviews Christa L. Ice and Kathleen V. Hoover-Dempsey, “Linking Parental Motivations for Involvement and Student Proximal Achievement Outcomes in Homeschooling and Public Schooling Settings” in Education and Urban Society 43, no. 3 (May 2011): 339-369. [Abstract available here]

Several years ago I reported on an earlier study by Hoover-Dempsey and one of her graduate students on homeschooling parents’ motivations.  The current study is related.  This time rather than just look at homeschooling parent motivations, the authors want to find out two things.  First, are there important differences between how parents who choose homeschooling view their abilities to teach, level of engagement with their kids, and perception of their kids’ capabilities, and how parents who choose public schools for their kids view the same variables?  Second, do the differences in parental perception lead to differences in student performance and self-image? 

Read Full Post »

How Commitment to Homeschooling Grows

This post reviews Leslie Safran, “Legitimate Peripheral Participation and Home Education” in Teaching and Teacher Education 26, no. 1 (2010): 107-112.

Safran, a British researcher who has written a few other works on homeschooling and in 2008 completed her doctoral dissertation, titled Exploring identity change and communities of practice among long term home educating parents, here introduces an interesting theoretical concept that she thinks helps explain how novice homeschoolers only marginally or temporarily committed to the practice become more engaged and committed practitioners.

Read Full Post »