Contribution
Description: Transforming Life into KnowledgeThe De-institutionalisation of Knowledge Transformation - How Home Education challenges our Picture of Education. During the last decades an increasing number of families throughout the world have rejected institutionalized forms of education and opted for a more individualized approach. Today Home Education can be found in most of the modern industrial nations, even if these states have highly developed schooling systems that are able to offer a good education to every child. While, in former centuries, learning at home was the only available option for many parents who could not afford to send their children to school or to pay a teacher, it is today a reaction to the institutionalized educational systems and their way to produce knowledge. As it is so common in our culture to connect learning with schooling, educational research is tempted to narrow the focus on some forms of knowledge transformation and to blend out others which are still important in order to keep alive a full understanding of the process of construction, transformation and transmission of knowledge and abilities.In this symposium, home education researchers from different European countries and Canada present research results. Cynthia Villalba (Sweden) gives insight into the legislation concerning de-institutionalized education (including teaching-learning, knowledge), and the developments and changes within this field. Christine Brabant (Canada) focuses on citizenship education. Considered to be one of the objectives of schooling, it is relevant to ask how home educators manage to integrate citizenship education in their educational perspectives and to examine how their knowledge and practices might influence our understanding of the complex process of citizenship education. Paula Rothermel (Great Britain) describes, based on her study of more than 400 home education families, which preconditions are necessary for successful learning processes. Thomas Spiegler (Germany) analyses the discussion about the position of home education in relation to public schooling. Using the theoretical frame that the sociologist Robert K. Merton presented in his studies about individual adaptation, social structure and anomie, he focuses on the connection between the emergence of home education and the process of institutionalisation of education.Throughout the world, there are teachers, educationalists and educational authorities who consider home education as a threat for children, society and, last but not least, for themselves. Often this perception is connected to the way in which home educators and their lobby organisations present their ideas and positions. The symposium goes behind this struggle. Aside from the question of home education's dangers or utility, the emergence, growth and professionalization of this movement challenges the traditional views of education and indicates ongoing developments in our culture concerning the way we try to transform knowledge. The symposium helps to integrate these signs in a broader understanding of education.
Abstract Christine Brabant:
In liberal societies, characterized as pluralistic and individualistic, a greater responsibility is put upon schools to generate a sense of shared values and to socialize the young. In many countries, as in Quebec (Canada), an explicit mention of Citizenship Education classes was recently added to the compulsory curriculum. At the same time, while most parents, partly because of changes in family structure and work load, do grant a greater part of their socialization role to school educators, some parents go the opposite direction and take upon themselves to supervise their children's education, out of schools. Then, what happens with Citizenship Education when children are home educated?
This communication will discuss recent literature on the social incidence of home education. It will then present a research project designed to collect the perspectives, offered by home educators, on the knowledge and practices at stake in their conceptions of Citizenship Education, and to give them an opportunity to better develop and articulate them. This study is part of a larger collaborative research project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, conducted in partnership with Citizenship Education teachers in high schools and aiming to produce professional knowledge and offer conceptual clarification about Citizenship Education.
Abstract Cynthia Villalba:
Governments have been experimenting with legislation and implementation concerning 'de-institutionalized' educational processes in childhood, namely teaching-learning and construction of knowledge outside of institutions. Sweden has had different regulations on alternatives to school education since the first legislation on the compulsory building of schools (1842). The legislation (and discourse) has changed from references to 'home', to 'individualized instruction', to the recent Education Act (1985), where home education is legislated as a non-specific exemption to school education. There has been, additionally, a growing government discourse on monitoring these activities. This can be examined through the lens of 'governance' and 'governmentality' (Rose, 1999). The study contributes new knowledge on Swedish education policy reform. Are there tensions resulting from such a diversification of educational providers (Carr-Hill, Carron and Peart, 2001), including re-transfers of powers to families and other private agents (Rose, 1999; Daun; 2002); what kind of diverse governing methods are involved, and why (Stout, Tallerico & Scribner, 1995)?
Methodology: Content- and discourse analyses of documentary and interview materials are used to study the research questions.
Conclusions: There are discursive struggles resulting from these demands for diverse educational forms, but also creative governance solutions based partly on authority-family trust and cooperation.
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