Home Educators and Arts Education

Posted on August 25, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Katie Burke, “The Challenges of Facilitating Arts Learning in Home Education” in British Educational Research Journal 45, no. 5 (October 2019): 961-978,

Summary: Burke, a lecturer at the School of Education at the University of South Queensland, Australia, here presents her third piece to date on the phenomenon of arts education in the home education context.  The first two articles (reviews here and here) drew on a qualitative survey of fourteen parents.  This newer article is based upon an online survey of 193 home educating adults in Australia. Continue reading →

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Virginia Communities and Homeschooling

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Luke C. Miller, “Community Characteristics of Homeschooling: The Case of Virginia” in G. K. Ingram and D. A. Kenyon, eds., Education, Land, and Location (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2014), pp. 386-416 [available here].

Summary: Miller is Associate Professor of education at the University of Virginia.  This chapter, published in 2014, escaped my notice until fairly recently, which is a shame as it offers a rare quantitative look at homeschooling. Miller begins with an overview of U.S. homeschooling, interpreting it as part of the broader school choice movement, and noting that it is harder to study than other forms of education given the paucity of data.  Miller’s study intends to provide and interpret the best data available for the state of Virginia. Because Virginia’s homeschooling law requires parents to register, Miller has the data to correlate homeschooling rates with other community variables.  This study thus tries to determine what factors are causing homeschooling to grow faster or slower in particular communities within the state. Continue reading →

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Arts Teaching and Home Education

Posted on July 29, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Katie Burke and David Cleaver, “The Art of Home Education: An Investigation Into the Impact of Context on Arts Teaching and Learning in Home Education” in Cambridge Journal of Education 49(2019): 771-788. [Abstract Here]

Summary: Dr. Katie Burke and David Cleaver are lecturers of at the University of Southern Queensland. This article is a follow-up to an earlier article the pair published in 2018 about arts education among homeschoolers.

They begin with Continue reading →

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The Influence of Parents’ Interests and Attitudes on Their Choice to Homeschool

Posted on June 23, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Baidi Baidi, “The Role of Parents’ Interests and Attitudes in Motivating Them to Homeschool Their Children” in Journal of Social Studies Education Research 10(2019): 156-177. [Abstract here]

Summary: I was unable to locate any information about this author, and the website for the State Islamic Institute (IAIN) of Surakarta did not work when I tried it.  There is a Wikipedia page about this institute here.  The Journal of Social Studies Education Research seems to be an English-language, open-access, online journal based in Turkey.

This article reports the results of a survey of a sample of 100 Indonesian homeschooling parents about their motivations.  Continue reading →

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Autonomy Within the Unschooling Movement

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Lorena Sánchez Tyson, “Trusting Children: Lifelong Learning and Autonomy within the Unschooling Movement” in Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning 13(2019): 23-40. [Abstract here]

Summary: Lorena Tyson is pursuing her doctoral degree in Education, Practice, and Society at the University College London Institute of Education. Originally from Tampico, Mexico, Ms. Tyson has degrees from universities in Mexico, the UK, and Spain.  She is currently researching literacy, lifelong learning, unschooling, and intercultural education.

In this article she discusses the controversial topic of homeschooling and autonomy, in her case in the context of unschooling, the most child-centered and least prescribed of homeschooling pedagogies.  Her thesis is that unschooling is a “subaltern pedagogical approach” (p. 23) that seeks to maximize lifelong learning (LLL) and hence should be appreciated by theorists who typically only speak of LLL in the context of institutional schooling. Continue reading →

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Homeschool for Sustainable Educational Development in Nigeria

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Abdulrahman Y. Maigida, “Homeschooling in the Non-formal Education of Nigeria: A Mechanism for Sustainable Educational Development”. [Abstract here]

Summary: Dr. Abdulrahman Maigida is a professor of educational foundations at the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.  He won a competition for research in Islamic education in 2018.

In this article Maigida provides what is to my knowledge the first English-language academic piece on homeschooling in Nigeria.  Continue reading →

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Expanding Future Farmers of America Membership to Homeschoolers

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Matthew J. Kararo and Neil A. Knobloch, “An Analysis of Education-related Policies Regarding the Participation Potential of Homeschool Students in Agricultural Education and FFA” in Journal of Agricultural Education 59(2018): 36-57. [Abstract here]

Summary: Matthew Kararo is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Florida International University in the Department of Biological Sciences and the STEM Transformation Institute. Dr. Neil A. Knobloch is the chair of the graduate program at Purdue University, the director of the Learner-Centered Teaching Project, and the coordinator of the Life Science Education Signature Area. His research interests include motivation, learner-centered teaching, and experiential learning. Through his research, Dr. Knobloch seeks to improve science literacy through informal life science education.

In this article Karo and Knobloch join forces to investigate the possibility of expanding educational opportunities the Future Farmers Association (FFA) provides in public schools to homeschoolers. Continue reading →

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Pennsylvania Christian Homeschooling Communities’ Perceptions of Vaccines

Posted on May 8, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Jeremiah D. McCoy, Julia E. Painter, and Kathryn H. Jacobsen, “Perceptions of Vaccination Within A Christian Homeschooling Community in Pennsylvania” in Vaccine 37(2019): 5770-5776. [Abstract here]

Summary:  George Mason University graduate Jeremiah McCoy is the Health Policy Analyst at Better Medicare Alliance. Former Assistant Professor in Global and Community Health at George Mason University, Dr. Julia Painter is a Senior Epidemiologist at the Fairfax County Health Department. Her research interests include the intersection of behavioral science and epidemiology; behavioral vaccinology; and child, adolescent, and school health. Dr. Kathryn Jacobsen, also from George Mason University, specializes in global health epidemiology. Her primary research interests are epidemiology, global health, infectious disease epidemiology, and global burden of disease.

The three authors here offer a qualitative study of Pennsylvania homeschoolers’ attitudes toward vaccination. Continue reading →

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BECOMING A HOME-EDUCATOR IN A NETWORKED WORLD: What the Internet Does to Homeschooling

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Amber Fensham-Smith, “Becoming a Home-Educator in a Networked World: Towards the Democratization of Education Alternatives?” in Other Education 8(1): 27-57. [Available Here].

Summary: Fensham-Smith, a Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England, here presents results emerging out of her doctoral dissertation of 2017, a mixed-methods study of over 300 UK home educators and their relationships with internet technology. Continue reading →

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Flexischooling in Scotland

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Milton Gaither

Record: Dumfries and Galloway Parenting Science Gang, “Flexischooling in Scotland: What We Did and Why” in Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives 8(2019): 58-67.

Summary: The Dumfries and Galloway Parenting Science Gang is a Facebook group formed in 2017 of four women from the same region (Dumfries and Galloway) interested in studying parenting.  They decided as a group to study flexischooling, the phenomenon of children attending school part-time and homeschooling part-time.  Continue reading →

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