Record: Ari Neuman and Oz Guterman, “How I Started Home Schooling: Founding Stories of Mothers Who Home School Their Children,” in Research Papers in Education 34, no. 2, (2019): 192-207. [abstract here]
Summary: Neuman and Guterman, who have been on a publishing bender over the past three years, here present the results of interviews with 25 Israeli homeschooling mothers, which they interpret to say something new and interesting about the much-studied topic of parental motivation for homeschooling.
After a solid literature review, Neuman and Guterman explain what they think all previous studies of parental motivation have missed. Previous studies have typically asked parents about their current motivation, which, Neuman and Guterman suggest, is likely different than the motivation that prompted their decision to homeschool in the first place. Several studies have found evolving rationales over time, but that has not changed the methodology of studies of parental motivation. Furthermore, most of the studies of parental motivation have asked parents to choose from a prefabricated list of options. This requires parents to accept “the researcher’s worldview and find a place for themselves” in what the researchers have constructed (p. 194). Again, Neuman and Guterman are not the first to point this out (as they freely acknowledge), but the insight has not had much effect on studies of parental motivation. Until now.
For this study Neuman and Guterman’s female assistants asked 25 homeschooling mothers simply to tell their founding stories. They were asked to “tell me how you decided to start homeschooling.” (p. 194) The stories told were then analyzed using the ATLAS. ti software and a protocol Neuman and Guterman describe at length. This process uncovered four “super-themes” that collectively capture the original motivations that emerged from these stories.
The first super-theme was “educational situation.” 14 out of 25 interviewees described one or more problems with the conventional school situation, ranging from child refusal, a disagreement over some policy issue at a local school, perceived negative influence of schooling on children, or a parent’s unwillingness to separate from the child for so long a period of time.
The second super-theme was “deliberate change.” 12 out of 25 interviewees mentioned this more ideological rationale. Examples included a desire to build stronger family bonds, a resolve to spare children from a parent’s own negative experiences in school, an expression of an alternative educational philosophy, and an effort to foster critical thinking and curiosity in their children.
The third super-theme was “opportunity.” 7 out of 25 interviewees mentioned pragmatic contextual factors that led them toward homeschooling, including mothers being uncomfortable in their work situation and wanting to quit, being fired from a job, moving to a new home, or in one case the closing of a local kindergarten.
The fourth super-theme was “flow.” 8 out of 25 mentioned this. Homeschooling wasn’t a deliberate choice for some. It just sort of happened as a natural next step in the unfolding of the parenting relationship. Mothers in this category never started with preschool, so when school time came up, it just seemed more natural to keep going at home.
In their discussion Neuman and Guterman note that the first two themes are very common findings in the motivation literature. They are the result of deliberate cognitive choice. The second two themes, they suggest, are far less commonly noted in the literature, perhaps because they are not based in rational choice and thus do not come to mind when parents are ask to enunciate their “reasons” for homeschooling. Here this process is not about choice but about “randomness and lack of planning.” (p. 202-203) The researchers suggest that parents who just sort of fell into homeschooling, when confronted with a list of motivation options, will likely choose one or several or even skip the question. What really happened will not be captured. They suggest that future quantitative studies include an option or two that capture this more arbitrary, unfolding sort of pathway into homeschooling.
Finally, Neuman and Guterman posit that eventually these accidental homeschoolers develop more rational reasons for why they are doing what they’re doing. These post hoc rationalizations “will cover the tracks of the initial reasons,” again making it harder for researchers to get it right. (p. 203)
Appraisal: I keep being surprised and impressed by Neuman and Guterman. Every time I see yet another article by the pair I expect a retread of something they’ve published before. Every time they manage to come up with something new. This article is only the most recent of several having to do in one way or another with the topic of parental motivation. It is, in my opinion, by far the best, not in terms of sample (it’s basically a convenience sample of 25 mothers all affiliated with homeschooling networks easy to access by the researchers), but because of the masterful way Neuman and Guterman use their findings to revise the now massive literature on parental motivation.
First a small caveat. A little-known and little-cited study by Mark Resetar back in 1990 used very similar methods to come to very similar conclusions about parental motivation. Resetar was to my knowledge the first to distinguish between original motivation and later motivations. Like Newman and Guterman do here, Resetar asked respondents to narrate how their motivations might have changed from their original decision to homeschool to the present. He found that parents tended to shift away from the negative concerns about institutional schools toward the positive benefits of home-based learning.
Likewise, several other researchers have found something very like Newman and Guterman’s third and fourth super-themes. For the third, Rachel Coleman’s remarkable 2010 Master’s Thesis first identified “Pragmatics” as a third category of homeschoolers to go along with Jane Van Galen’s famous “Ideologues” and “Pedagogues” (who are nicely captured in Neuman and Guterman’s 2nd and 1st categories respectively even as they avoid some of the pitfalls of Van Galen’s typology). That more pragmatic, “accidental homeschooler” approach has been noted by others, especially by researchers studying homeschoolers of children with special needs, including Winstanley, McDonald & Lopes, Jolly & Matthews, and Kendall & Taylor. It is also very like Jennifer Lois’ “second choice” designation. Furthermore, some of these researchers, and others like Leslie Safran Barson, have found that ideological rationales do indeed gradually displace the more pragmatic reasons over time as families are gradually socialized into the homeschooling subculture.
For the fourth flow theme, again Jennifer Lois seems to me to have gotten there first. For many of her “first choice” homeschoolers, homeschooling just seemed like a natural outgrowth of intensive mothering. Similar themes have been noted by other researchers studying unschooling mothers. Mothers who begin with natural childbirth, family bed, extended breast-feeding, aversion to vaccinations, and so on, often find unschooling to be a natural next step. That’s flow.
Even if neither of these final two themes are truly original findings, what is original is that they are integrated with the usual suspects in a way that I find very compelling. Neuman and Guterman’s four super-themes manage to capture the conventional findings from Van Galen on as well as to incorporate the as-yet not synthesized findings of the researchers I’ve linked in the two above paragraphs. With this new four-category motivational model we can account for ideology, pedagogy, accidental pragmatics, and natural mothering, and we also get the vital claim that the last two are often over time rationalized away as homeschooling mothers start to come up with reasons for doing by choice what at first they did by nature or by necessity. To me that’s a remarkable achievement.
Milton Gaither, author of Homeschool: An American History
Messiah College