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.
Fensham-Smith begins with a literature review situating her study within the broader literature on the role internet communities play in fostering participatory democracy and thick social ties. She also notes that elective home education (EHE) has grown dramatically in the UK since the mid 2010s, up about 40% between 2014 and 2017, though accurate counts are problematic. Previous studies of families choosing EHE have found them to be mostly middle class and university-educated, though there are also minority Traveler and Muslim homeschoolers who have received less attention from researchers. The middle-class homeschoolers tend to network and form formal and informal associations, which are largely organized and popularized through the internet. In addition to networking, the internet has facilitated political activism and recruitment of new families to the practice.
Fensham-Smith wanted to learn more about how the internet functions in the EHE process in the United Kingdom, especially with recruitment of new families and with the development of communities and networks among EHE practitioners. To do that she conducted a two-part study using a variety of methods (she calls it a “bricolage” [p. 35]). First, she reached out to Facebook and Yahoo! homeschool groups, requesting that members fill out a 55-question survey covering demographics, network participation, and internet usage. She obtained 242 responses. Next, she conducted 52 semi-structured interviews some of these respondents: home education leaders (N=12), parents and children (N=32), and home-educated young adults (N=8), most face-to-face but some by phone or Skype. Finally, Fensham-Smith attended a large summer camp frequented by many UK home educators. The adults interviewed were almost all female, and most of the children interviewed were male.
Fensham-Smith’s findings fall into many categories. One thing she found was that a lot of the online groups are exclusive, setting boundaries for membership including requiring parents be ideologically committed to home education, or requiring participation in a certain number of face-to-face events before being permitted to join online. One organizer explained that these sorts of rules help alleviate the problem of many people saying they’ll attend an event but not actually showing up.
A second finding concerned the profile of UK homeschoolers: the families surveyed were thickly enmeshed in social groups, possessing “high levels of cultural capital” (p. 41). They were also as a whole much better educated than the national mean for the UK. They were almost all white, almost all in two-parent homes with stay-at-home mothers. Consistent with previous surveys of UK families, religion seemed to play only a very minor role in the calculus for choosing EHE, mentioned by only 17% of respondents. Respondents also fell nicely into the categories Ruth Morton first identified: “first choice” families (Morton called them “natural choice”), who think of EHE as a long-term ideal, and “last resort” families, who choose it only out of desperation after all else has failed. First choicers often learned about EHE through the internet before having children or when children were very young and were thus primed to make the decision to embrace EHE when the time came. Last resorters, similarly, discovered EHE and became positively predisposed to it through internet exposure as they were struggling through a child’s negative school experiences. Online communities also helped last resorters navigate the sometimes tricky process of removing a child from school.
A third finding is that the internet has facilitated the sorting of EHE families into more specialized tribes. A large number of newer recruits to the practice do not share the radical libertarian or anti-government ideology of so many of the long-term early adopters. Thanks to the internet’s ideological sorting, these people can find one another and experience a more mainstream version of EHE together, and the more ideologically driven can do the same.
After laying all of this out, Fensham-Smith engages in some normative discussion. She worries that the tribal sorting facilitated by internet technology may undermine EHE’s ability to offer individuals, families, and the nation as a whole exposure to otherness. She also worries about a potential digital divide between the families she captured in her study (middle class, well-educated, white) and other demographic groups. She concludes by noting that her study, limited as it was to a group of home educators she found through internet groups, fails to capture some of this diversity, and she calls for more deliberate efforts to bridge the divides between factions of networked EHE practitioners as well as with those who are perhaps out of the loop entirely because of lack of internet access.
Appraisal: The first thing to note about this study is that it showcases a real methodological advance in home education research in the UK. Historically, most UK home education scholarship has been prosecuted by advocates, whose efforts, while not so brazenly political as the advocacy-based research of the United States, has nevertheless clearly been conducted with an eye toward burnishing the status of elective home education. Additionally, most of the previous studies of UK home educators have used very, very small sample sizes. This dispassionate study, with an N of 242, using rigorous social science protocols for data collection and analysis raises the bar for UK studies considerably.
Having said that, we have here, as is so often the case in homeschooling research, a glorified convenience sample. It’s large and robust, but, as Fensham-Smith herself readily acknowledges, it doesn’t capture the diversity of UK home education, largely because it is all but impossible to do so given the UK’s deregulated environment. The posited “digital divide” is plausible, but there is no actual evidence for it in this study, because the methodology has no way of capturing anyone off the grid. Her concluding call for future research on these potentially less-networked, less middle-class homeschoolers is apropos.
Fensham-Smith’s most important finding is that the internet really hasn’t been a game-changer in terms of EHE access or collaboration. The same divisions that existed among home educators of different ideologies and pedagogical orientations before the internet are with us still. If anything, the divisions are even more entrenched, the communities even more purely sorted into tribes. Though she doesn’t have any data about non-wired home education, it is plausible to assert that lack of internet access would likely be a hindrance to participation in home educator communities now that so much of that community networking and advertising happens online. To me none of these findings are all that surprising, but it is helpful to have a capable, well-written, rigorously documented piece of scholarship to offer empirical validation of these intuitive assertions.
Milton Gaither
Messiah College