2013 Homeschooling-themed Issue of the PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION

Every so often an academic journal decides to devote an entire issue to the topic of homeschooling.  Here is a list of such themed issues:

International Journal of Elementary Education 3, no. 1 (October 2010).

Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009).

Journal of College Admission 185 (Fall 2004).

Evaluation and Research in Education 17, no. 2-3 (2003).

Peabody Journal of Education 75, no. 1-2 (2000).

Education and Urban Society 21, no. 1 (November 1988).

The Peabody Journal of Education, whose 2000 special issue was a landmark in the history of homeschooling research, released another special issue in 2013, edited, as was the 2000 issue, by Dr. Brian D. Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI). 

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Upcoming Changes to this Blog and a Link to Where It’s Eventually Moving

Regular readers of my blog know that I’ve been working with several other scholars to build the International Center for Home Education Research (ICHER) website.  ICHER was founded last year by an international team of scholars with the intent of both facilitating networking among scholars interested in homeschooling and of making the research on homeschooling more accessible to the general public.

Of course making the results of research available to the public is precisely what I’ve been doing on this blog since 2008.  Given that track record, my colleagues placed me in charge of the “Reviews” section of the ICHER site.  It does basically the same thing this blog has been doing.  I have spent the past several months transferring over the great majority of my posts from this blog to the ICHER site.  The only things I didn’t bring over were the occasional forays I took into current events or representations of homeschooling in literature or on film.

Over the next few weeks I’ll continue to do weekly posts both here and on the ICHER reviews section.  But eventually I’ll stop updating here and post exclusively on the ICHER site.  As I know I have many readers who have programmed their computers to give automatic updates through facebook or wordpress whenever I post something, I want to give you plenty of warning before I stop updating on this site.  I’d ask you now to begin familiarizing yourself with the new site in anticipation of the eventual move.  Thanks!

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How European Nations Regulate Home Education and How They Could Do it Better

This post reviews Henk Blok and Sjoerd Karsten, “Inspection of Home Education in European Countries” in European Journal of Education 46, no. 1 (2011), pp. 138-152.

Blok and Karsten, both at the Kohnstamm Institute at the University of Amsterdam, here summarize what is known about homeschooling regulations in 14 European countries.

The countries covered are these:  Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden.

For each the authors give a succinct summary of the nation’s homeschooling situation, and they recap it all in a convenient chart.  Over at the ICHER website we have our own graphic with some of this information, but Blok and Karsten give much more detail.

After summarizing the situation in each of the 14 countries they make a few generalizations and conclude with four policy recommendations.  First the generalizations:

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The International Center for Home Education Research goes live!

Just a quick note here to alert readers to the new website for ICHER, the International Center for Home Education Research.  It is a brand new organization several homeschool researchers from around the world have been working on for some time now.  The website has a lot of very helpful information, including up-to-date summaries of homeschooling regulations in the United States and many other countries and the most comprehensive bibliography of homeschool research available anywhere, all for free.

It also has a blog.  I’m the moderator of the blog.  As you’ll see, the tone on the ICHER blog is a bit less personal than the one I’ve cultivated here.  But the content is very similar.  In fact I’m beginning the ICHER blog by re-publishing in edited form the most important blog posts on homeschool research I’ve done over the years.  I’m starting back in 2008 and working toward the present, so if you’re relatively new to this blog you might enjoy reading the posts on ICHER to see what you missed.  If you’ve been with me since 2008 you might enjoy, as I have, revisiting some of these earlier posts to refresh yourself on the content.

I plan in the future to continue both this blog and the ICHER blog.  On weeks where I do a review of a serious piece of homeschooling research I’ll likely only briefly mention it here and provide a link to the ICHER blog post.  But when I want to review less scholarly things like children’s books, movies, memoirs, and the like, I’ll continue to write them up here.  I might also on occasion make more personal comments on research here that I wouldn’t make on the more professional blog at ICHER.  Anyway, I encourage anyone who’s enjoyed my posts on this blog to check out the resources available on the new ICHER website, to like the organization on Facebook if you feel so inclined, and to follow it on Twitter at ICHER@ICHERtweet.  Thanks!

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