Record: Jennifer L. Jolly and Michael S. Matthews, “The Shifting Landscape of the Homeschooling Continuum” in Educational Review (2018). [Abstract Here]
Summary: Jolly, Associate Professor of Gifted Education at the University of Alabama, and Matthews, Director of Gifted Programs at UNC Charlotte, have collaborated on multiple occasions in the past. In 2017 and 2018 they published a pair of qualitative studies of blogging mothers of gifted children who homeschool (reviews here and here). Back in 2012 they collaborated with Jonathan Nester to write one of the pathbreaking articles on homeschooling and gifted learners (review here). In this piece they offer no new empirical research but seek to incorporate their work with homeschooling families with gifted children into the broader definition of homeschooling. To do this, Jolly and Matthews begin with Jane Van Galen. Back in the mid 1980s Van Galen produced one of the best early doctoral dissertations on homeschooling, which she then popularized in an influential 1988 article and then again in one of the first notable scholarly books on homeschooling, published in 1991. Jolly and Matthews reprise Van Galen’s classic distinction between “ideologues,” or Conservative Christians who homeschool out of a religious commitment to the family and rejection of secular public education, and “pedagogues,” or child-centered families who react against the regimentation of institutional schools, preferring a more natural approach to learning for their children. They explain how Van Galen’s distinction has been cited over and over in the subsequent literature.
But it is time, argue Jolly and Matthews, to put Van Galen’s definition aside. Why? Three reasons:
1. a more diverse range of families now homeschool, for a more diverse set of reasons.
2. U.S. society has changed a lot since Van Galen wrote in the 1980s. The internet especially has proved transformative for homeschooling practice.
3. Increasingly the lines between homeschool and conventional school are blurring as various hybrids grow in popularity.
After citing a lot of homeschooling scholarship to buttress those three claims, Jolly and Matthews offer their own alternative definition. The definition is not easily reduced to words. Rather, they provide an image of a staircase divided into three parts. Each part is an aspect of homeschooling: the content (what is taught), the pedagogy (how it’s taught), and the context (where it’s taught). For each of those three aspects, homeschooling can be more or less superintended by the parent. Content, for example, might be, at the lowest point in the staircase, completely controlled by parent. Higher up the staircase, however, content is controlled more by external agencies, be they co-ops, schools, or the child’s own choices. Pedagogy is the same way: parent-driven at the bottom of the staircase, child or institution driven at the top. So with context. At the bottom of the staircase it’s all in the home. At the top a lot of it happens elsewhere.
Appraisal:
While previous Jolly/Matthews collaborations have made real contributions to the literature on homeschooling, this piece I don’t anticipate making much of an impact. It does not really offer anything of substance. The literature review is acceptable. The idea of challenging Van Galen’s categories is great, and Jolly and Matthews are certainly not the first to quibble with them. But given the buildup, the payoff was so minimal here. Jolly and Matthews’ “definition” is not really definitional. It took me a whole paragraph just to briefly summarize it, and I left out the very problemmatic “autonomy” claim that they have in their model. Such a complicated model is not the sort of thing that is going to be picked up as a replacement for Van Galen’s easy binary.
Nevertheless, Jolly and Matthews are certainly correct in their overall appraisal. Homeschooling has changed a lot since the late 1980s, as has the society within which it is practiced. When asked, I usually just say that a wider variety of people are homeschooling in a wider variety of ways for a wider variety of reasons than did so in the past. That’s basically what they say, but with a lot more words and a staircase metaphor that I don’t find particularly helpful or clarifying.
Milton Gaither, Messiah College