Record: Katie Burke and David Cleaver, “The Art of Home Education: An Investigation Into the Impact of Context on Arts Teaching and Learning in Home Education” in Cambridge Journal of Education 49(2019): 771-788. [Abstract Here]
Summary: Dr. Katie Burke and David Cleaver are lecturers of at the University of Southern Queensland. This article is a follow-up to an earlier article the pair published in 2018 about arts education among homeschoolers.
They begin with an orientation, summarizing the literature on pedagogy, which posits a continuum between highly structured homeschooling at one extreme, “unschooling” or complete child-initiated learning at the other, and most homeschoolers somewhere in the middle picking and choosing eclectically as suits their needs. Furthermore, a distinct homeschooling pedagogy of informal interactions and situational learning emerging organically in everyday life sets this approach apart from the more deliberate and formal pedagogy of institutional schooling. Burke and Cleaver associate this tendency with Lev Vygotsky’s famous sociocultural theory of learning.
Next Burke and Cleaver explain their study, which was the same as that used for their previous article. A convenience sample of fourteen homeschooling parents (13 women, 1 man) from Austraila were given a survey and invited to participate in online forum discussions for three months, responding to questions about art education posed by the researchers and to one another. Children of these parents ranged from preschool to age 14. All were recruited through the popular website AussieHomeshool.com.au. The two major themes to emerge from the forum discussions were the several strategies used by homeschooling parents to deliver arts education, the subject of Burke and Cleaver’s previous article, and the contextual influences on the process, which is the subject of this piece. Briefly, the five approaches Burke and Cleaver expounded in their earlier publication were child-led learning, resource-led learning, outsourcing to other settings, collaboration with other homeschoolers, and integration of arts into other subjects.
Analysis of their forum data led Burke and Cleaver to find three levels of context influencing arts education in the homeschool setting. Least powerful were community factors, including curricular mandates from Australian states. More significant were resources in the local community, including area art galleries, drama clubs, dance programs, music teachers, library resources, and so forth. Also important were collaborative opportunities with other area homeschoolers. Cost as well as availability played a role in all of this for many families.
Penetrating deeper than community factors is the overall family arts ecology. The priority given to arts education varied by family due to several family factors. Some families did not place a high priority on art in general, and as such that element of children’s education was given less attention. Just like in institutional schools, often the more “academic” subjects took priority. Time constraints, note the researchers, “always led to the arts being eliminated first.” (p. 780) Another family factor concerned children’s interest level. Families with children drawn to artistic expression tended to include more of it than families whose children did not express interest or exhibit much aptitude. Finally, given the cost of expert instruction, families with more disposable income tended to outsource more, providing more enrichment opportunities outside the home than did families with more limited means.
The most important sociocultural factor in arts education, however, was the artistic background of the individual parent. Primary here was the parent’s own interest in and experience with artistic endeavor. As Robert Kunzman found in his U.S. sample, parents who were good at art or music tended to prioritize it in their own children’s lives and were able to share their enthusiasm for the subject with their children. Another important parental factor identified by Burke and Cleaver is the parent’s overall attitude toward the value of art. Parents who thought of the arts more as embellishments than as integral to a life well lived tended not to prioritize them in their daily homeschooling as did parents who saw art as a vital part of the human experience.
Burke and Cleaver conclude by acknowledging the limitations of a convenience sample of 14 and call for further research to see if this initial finding, that context matters a lot for art education in the homeschool setting, holds for other homeschooling families.
Appriasal: I enjoyed this piece very much for the clarity it provided. Its three divisions of community, family, and individual (parent) context, with the added insight that the closer you get to the individual the deeper the impact of the context, is a compelling model. Just as their first article did a nice job categorizing and naming five types of art pedagogy, so this three-stage context model offers a great starting point for future research. The finding that parents tend to teach to their strengths and prioritize what they themselves enjoy has been found before. This corroboration of that insight is helpful.
I do wonder if comparative study might disclose a fourth sociocultural context–that of the national culture. The widest circle Burke and Cleaver consider is the local community. But if there were dramatic differences in art education among homeschoolers in different countries, then perhaps an even broader context piece is involved. It would be especially interesting to study this issue in a country not so deeply connected to the Anglo-colonial past. Do homeschooled children in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, or South America have similar art education experiences? If not, are there factors broader than their local communities, family dynamics, and parent biographies that might be a factor?
Milton Gaither