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.
Burke begins this article with a fairly thick context piece, first documenting the growing rates of home education in Australia and then going into detail about discussions within the arts education literature over definitions of terms like “quality” arts education, the relative merits of generalist vs. expert instruction in the arts, and how the diversity of pedagogical approaches used by home educating families makes it difficult to apply the current literature to that context. She concludes this first section with a summary of the findings of her earlier studies, reviews of which are linked above.
Next Burke explains her study. She secured 175 completed surveys from home educating parents recruited through online forums. The instrument included both multiple choice and free response items, all of which she interpreted through “thematic analysis,” which seeks to allow the findings to emerge organically as the researcher picks up on common themes in subject responses. Coding for these themes led Burke to posit several generalizations pertaining to the challenges faced by and support strategies implemented by home educators trying to provide arts education to their children.
Challenges included “a lack of parental background knowledge and confidence in the arts, arts resourcing, time constraints, the breadth of arts learning and meeting individual
student needs.” (p. 967) Some parents felt under-prepared to give good arts instruction because they didn’t consider themselves to be very artistic. Some parents expressed how arts education requires expensive apparatus that their budgets strained to provide. Some struggled to include arts education given the many other subjects their children were studying. Some felt overwhelmed by the vastness of the domain dubbed “the arts,” which includes visual arts, music, theater, and more–too much for any one parent to master. Finally, given the multi-age nature of so many home educating families, some parents struggled to make arts education age-appropriate.
Support strategies articulated by Burke’s sample included both formal and informal approaches. Some 40% of Burke’s sample “embraced spontaneous arts learning without the need for adult supervision,” and 63% used a child’s native interest as the point of entry (p. 973). Only 25% said that they provided planned arts education. Beyond the informal freedom of discovery learning home education fosters, those families that do script arts education often said that they draw on outside expertise–music or art tutors especially. Many parents said they would appreciate enrichment arts education themselves, which they thought would make them more confident and effective teachers of the subject.
In her discussion, Burke notes that, though the home education context is unique, the challenges many parents face are not unlike those of generalist classroom teachers who must teach art even when they haven’t been formally trained to do so. A key finding of the literature on classroom teachers is that improving a teacher’s sense of self-efficacy as an arts instructor leads to much more satisfying outcomes for both teachers and students. Burke thinks the same thing would happen with home educating mothers. External supports like music or art lessons can be prohibitively expensive for many, so the best course of action would be to provide programs for home educating parents to foster their own competence and confidence as artists and teachers of the arts. On the other hand, most in her sample were satisfied with what they were doing already, so even if such programs existed it is not certain that homeschooling parents would take advantage of them.
Appraisal: Burke’s growing body of work is continuing to enhance our understanding of arts education, at least in the Australian context. Earlier pieces laid out helpful categories and typologies. This one adds a larger sample size and some actual descriptive statistics. Particularly interesting to me is how few of the families in her survey actually set aside deliberate time for arts instruction. I would have expected a larger number. Here in the United States, in many states there are now laws permitting homeschoolers to take advantage of public education extracurriculars, which include music and arts experiences. I have seen no data on the extent to which homeschooling families in states permitting this actually take advantage of the resources, though anecdotal accounts of homeschooler participation in school sports suggest that only a very small percentage of homeschoolers play. Local public libraries are frequently favorite haunts of homeschooling families, so perhaps arts-based programs housed there might see better enrollment. Finally, I don’t know whether cooperatives are as popular in Australia as they have become among U.S. homeschoolers. Many co-ops offer arts classes, put on plays or musicals, and so forth. It would be interesting to see how samples of homeschooling families in other countries would compare to these Australians.
Milton Gaither