{"id":534,"date":"2013-01-21T16:22:07","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T16:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=534"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:20:14","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:20:14","slug":"heeding-the-voices-of-learners-a-qualitative-look-at-one-childs-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=534","title":{"rendered":"HEEDING THE VOICES OF LEARNERS: A Qualitative Look at One Child’s Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record:<\/strong> Lizebelle van Schalkwyk and Cecilia Bouwer, \u201cHomeschooling: Heeding the Voices of Learners\u201d in Education as Change<\/em> 15, no. 2 (December 2011): 179-190.<\/p>\n

Summary: <\/strong>van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, both professors at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, here try to attend to the voices of actual homeschooled children to get a sense of what they think about the practice.<\/p>\n

Since 1997 homeschooling has been legal in South Africa.\u00a0 But research on homeschooling, assert van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, has very seldom paid any attention to what the children being homeschooled think about the experience.\u00a0 What little information there is on childhood experiences is typically gleaned from impersonal surveys.\u00a0 To correct this gap the researchers attempt a qualitative study that attends to the thick family context of beliefs, habits, and interactions.<\/p>\n

The authors selected four homeschooling families in South Africa for their study.\u00a0 They say the selection was for \u201cmaximum variation\u201d in terms of person and curriculum type.\u00a0 Here are the four families:<\/p>\n

1. An English speaking family that had been homeschooling for seven years with two girls.\u00a0 The mother used whatever material was at hand and followed no specific curriculum.<\/p>\n

2. An Afrikaans speaking family with one son.\u00a0 This boy had attended school up to grade 4 but asked to be homeschooled instead, which he had been for the past three years using the popular ACE<\/a> (Accelerated Christian Education) curriculum.<\/p>\n

3. An English speaking Asian family with two boys, who had been in school until grades 6 and 3, when their parents pulled them out.\u00a0 For the past 2.5 years they too had been using the ACE curriculum.<\/p>\n

4. An Afrikaans speaking family with two girls that had been homeschooling for six years, using KONOS<\/a>, a venerable unit study curriculum, and Love2Learn<\/a>, a resource for Catholic homeschoolers.<\/p>\n

After laying out this diversity, the authors for reasons not explained decide to limit their investigation to the experiences of one girl in the first family, who they name Sally.\u00a0 Sally\u2019s mother employs what the authors name \u201cChristian prescriptive discourse\u201d and \u201cisolationist discourse\u201d as her motivation for homeschooling, and the father adds \u201chuman development discourse\u201d as well.\u00a0 (p. 183)<\/p>\n

The authors then move to Sally herself.\u00a0 Despite her isolated and very conservative upbringing, Sally wants to become a fashion designer.\u00a0 \u201cI love<\/em> drawing clothes,\u201d she says.\u00a0 The authors note a persistent double consciousness in Sally\u2013on the one hand she wants to be obedient to her parents and to her Christian beliefs, but on the other she chafes against the rules.<\/p>\n

The researchers had Sally draw a picture of a person.\u00a0 She did.\u00a0 They then asked her to tell a story about the person.\u00a0 Sally named her person \u201cTulip\u201d and invented a story that is very like her own\u2013Tulip longs to go out and explore the world, but duties and family ties keep her held back, which makes her unhappy but resigned.<\/p>\n

Next the authors administered the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test) to Sally.\u00a0 Again, they uncover a deep resentment to external rules but a resignation that they simply must be obeyed and that there is no other option.<\/p>\n

After laying all of this out in great detail, the authors then make a few general points.\u00a0 They return to their larger sample and assert that only one of the boys out of all of the children they listened to seemed to have similar educational goals and outlooks to the parents.\u00a0 This boy \u201cfelt that his parents actually took his views and inputs into account, and this probably contributed to a homeschool situation in which he seemed to flourish.\u201d (p. 188)\u00a0 But the rest of the children seemed to have their own learning and happiness compromised \u201cfor the sake of their parents\u2019 discourses and goals.\u201d (188)\u00a0 They conclude that South Africa therefore needs a public policy<\/p>\n

that is strong and comprehensive enough to at least monitor the scholastic progress of the learner consistently, and to promote the emotional and social wellbeing of the learner through the evaluation and accreditation of homeschool institutions and programmes. (p. 189)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>I found this paper to be methodologically weak.\u00a0 The authors begin with four seemingly random families.\u00a0 Then for reasons they never explain they decide to devote the entirety of the paper to the experiences of only one of the children in one of the families.\u00a0 We are not told whether the other children were interviewed, given TAT and drawing exercises, and the rest, and if so what they did with them.\u00a0 Given what the authors find with Sally (that she\u2019s miserable and stifled but tries hard to accept and even embrace her situation), and the political lessons they derive from this one anecdote (that South African homeschoolers need to be accredited by the state and evaluated for academic and social development), one would think they would try a little harder to demonstrate that this one example is somehow representative of something.\u00a0 What we have here, then, is a policy prescription based on the researchers\u2019 interpretation of one child\u2019s experiences.<\/p>\n

Qualitative research such as this article provides can be wonderful at rounding out the complexities of an experience like homeschooling.\u00a0 I love the idea<\/em> of this study\u2013paying careful, nuanced attention to children who are being homeschooled.\u00a0 But the write-up here is weak.\u00a0 The writers might have presented case studies of all<\/em> the children rather than the one student who I\u2019m guessing was the most conflicted in their sample.\u00a0 And a good anthropologist need not feel the imperative to rush toward some policy proposal.\u00a0 Stories well told can often speak for themselves.\u00a0 As it is, the authors have reduced what could have been a rich and nuanced work of scholarship to little more than a political editorial.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: Lizebelle van Schalkwyk and Cecilia Bouwer, \u201cHomeschooling: Heeding the Voices of Learners\u201d in Education as Change 15, no. 2 (December 2011): 179-190. Summary: van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, both professors at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, here try … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[475,476,478,474,479,480,477],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international","tag-cecelia-bouwer","tag-education-as-change","tag-konos","tag-lizebelle-van-schalkwyk","tag-love2learn","tag-thematic-apperception-test","tag-university-of-pretoria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1115,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions\/1115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}