A Young Troubadour Encounters Homeschooling

This post reviews Philip Brand, The Neighbor’s Kid: A Cross-Country Journey in Search of What Education Means to Americans (Capital Research Center, 2010).

Brand, a young staffer at the Capital Research Center, a conservative non-profit best known for its opposition to labor unions and environmentalists, here recounts his experiences during the 2008-2009 school year when he and his brother took a road trip that led them across the entire United States four times.  In route he visited dozens of different kinds of schools, including several homeschools.

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Coleman on Homeschoolers in Middletown

This post reviews Rachel E. Coleman, “Ideologues: Pedagogues, Pragmatics: A Case Study of the Homeschool Community in Delaware County, Indiana” (M.A. Thesis: Ball State University, 2010).

Rachel Coleman, a reader of this blog, graciously sent me a copy of her Master’s Thesis she just defended this month at Ball State University.  It’s wonderful.  In this post I’ll summarize it and stress its main contributions to our knowledge about homeschooling.

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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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Lucy Frank’s THE HOMESCHOOL LIBERATION LEAGUE

This post reviews Lucy Frank, The Homeschool Liberation League (New York: Penguin, 2009).

Frank, author of seven young adult titles, here offers a delightful contribution to the growing genre of children’s literature with homeschooled characters. 

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Susan Juby on Homeschooled Adolescence

This post continues my exploration of recent children’s lit employing homeschooling themes with a review of the young adult fiction trilogy of Susan Juby, whose comedic heroine is Alice MacLeod, a sarcastic and disaffected teen who was homeschooled until age fifteen.  The books, with their American publication date, are as follows: 

Alice, I Think(HarperTempest, 2003)

Miss Smithers(2004)

Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last (2005) 

 

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Furness on Homeschoolers and Libraries

This post reviews Adrienne Furness, Helping Homeschoolers in the Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 2008).

Furness, a children’s librarian, here produces a book aimed at other librarians, informing them about homeschooling and suggesting ways librarians can better serve homeschooling patrons. 

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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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Griffith on Viral Homeschooling

This post reviews Mary Griffith, Viral Learning: Reflections on the Homeschooling Life (LULU, 2007).

Griffith, known by many in the homeschooling community for her Homeschooling Handbook: From Preschool to High School, A Parent’s Guide(1997, revised in 1999) and The Unschooling Handbook : How to Use the Whole World As Your Child’s Classroom (1998), here offers her musings on a number of topics after years of homeschooling her own children and being, as she puts it with self-deprecating irony, a “famous homeschool author.” 

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