Current global policy discourses of parental involvement in education and the social inclusion of diverse marginalized and multi-ethnic populations have been lauded as the key to remediating educational inequalities, such as underachievement and low retention and participation rates in higher education (Reay, 2010). Homework policies, instituted by governments over the last decade, provide a micro example of the ways in which educational policies may be offered as a panacea for improved academic outcomes for all students. For example, in part as a response to the imperative to ‘raise standards’, and develop ‘quality learning outcomes, students in numerous countries are spending increasing amounts of time on homework, particularly in primary schools (Baker and LeTendre, 2005). Further, parental participation in homework in the UK, Australia, and in many European countries has been central to the ‘home-school partnership’ agenda, championed by governments as a cost-neutral mechanism for increasing academic outcomes. However, homework policies discursively position parents as capable educational workers, despite research evidence that poor or culturally and linguistically diverse families may not have access to the sets of social and cultural capital required to fully engage with homework in the manner assumed in policy (Dooley, 2009; Hutchison, 2011). The widespread implementation of such policies can mask locally differentiated community resources and fail to improve the major educational inequities and exclusions they were intended to address. 

Drawing on a series of ethnographic studies in Australia, Denmark and the UK into the lived experience of homework for students and their families in socio-culturally diverse communities, this presentation investigates the capacity for participatory visual research methods to make visible the enduring complexity of social inequalities and the challenges for educational research in addressing the equity agendas of schooling. There are two core sets of issues this research seeks to address. The first is the issue of class-based educational disadvantage for certain groups of students and the role of homework in intensifying educational inequalities. The second is the effect of homework on home – school relationships and on the identities of the parents, teachers and children who are subject to its regulatory functions. From this, three key research questions arise: To what extent and through which mechanisms does homework transmit, preserve or secure educational privilege for different groups of students? What insights emerge into home-school relations through a cross-cultural comparison of homework as a socio-culturally located practice? What are the implications for social and educational policies?

While traditionally, the sociological study of the impact of various aspects of schooling on children’s lives has been via observation (Hargreaves, 1967; Ball, 1981; Heath, 1983), visual methodologies for researching lived experience have sought to position children and young people as active participants in the research process. Visual research methods are increasingly being mobilized to explore situated experiences across a range of educational settings encompassing preschool (Einarsdottir, 2007), secondary science classrooms (Hubber et al, 2010), community centres (White, 2007), homes (Bräu,et al, 2017) and across in and outside school environments (Hernández-Hernández &  Sancho-Gil, 2016). In this participatory methodology, children and young people are positioned as competent knowledge producers, capable of developing and expressing their own unique perspectives on issues that concern them, such as schooling and homework (Hutchison, 2011). In Bourdieuian terms, visual methods have the potential to foreground the embodied nature of habitus, in making visible the material and emotional realities of the social and cultural worlds in which learning occurs and illustrating the ways in which various capitals are mobilised by parents, teachers, tutors, young people and children to shape learner dispositions and identities.

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