This research focuses on the interrelationships between families and education systems in Australia, Denmark and England through an examination of the cultural meanings and impact of homework on learning and family life in diverse sociocultural contexts. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’, capital and field the paper explores the ‘family habitus’ and the learning dispositions formed through the interrelationships between the private domain of the family and the institutional habitus of the school in order to understand the ways in which homework produces educational advantage and disadvantage for particular groups of children. 

Despite a long history of government policies to achieve greater equity in education internationally, the links between social disadvantage, educational underachievement and social exclusion remain robust.  As a socially located practice, homework raises significant tensions for educators concerned with social justice, since successful completion requires a range of inequitably distributed social and cultural capitals. Refugee and linguistic minority populations are aware of homework’s potential to provide opportunities for consolidating understandings and developing English language competence (Hutchison, 2007; Jeynes, 2003, 2007; Miller et al 2009), although very few studies have examined the effectiveness of parent involvement for students from various socio-economic and cultural backgrounds (Patall, et al. 2008). This acknowledgement of homework’s capacity to enhance learning found within refugee and recently arrived migrant populations contrasts with the views of middle-class communities in which students and parents are more likely to maintain that homework contributes little of enduring educational value, particularly during primary schooling (Hutchison, 2007). The challenge for educators aware of this dilemma is to develop strategies for managing homework equitably.

Over the past decade, in part as a response to the imperative to ‘raise standards’, and develop ‘quality learning outcomes’ western liberal democratic societies such as Britain, Scandinavia and Australia have added homework to the suite of education policies shaping school practice. Students in these countries consequently spend increasing amounts of time on homework, particularly in primary schools (Baker and LeTendre, 2005). Further, parental participation in homework in the UK, Australia, and more recently in Denmark, has been central to the ‘home-school partnership’ agenda, championed by governments as a cost-neutral mechanism for increasing academic outcomes. In Australia and in the UK, national guidelines have been introduced which foreground the centrality of parental involvement in homework and indeed the main aim of homework in the UK is to engage parents in their children’s learning (Hallam, 2009).  In Denmark, despite the absence of specific homework policies,  various national initiatives, such as the  development project ‘Education for All,’ assume the educational value of homework, especially for underperforming students and  offer migrant  parents training in supporting their children’s homework (Kryger & Ravn, 2009). Similarly in Australia, 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; Forster, 1999; Hutchison, 2007, 2011; Weston, 1999).

Baker, D. & LeTendre, G., 2005, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press. Dooley, K. 2009, Homework for refugee middle school students with backgrounds marked by low levels of engagement with English school literacy. Literacy Learning : the Middle Years, 17(3), 28-36. Forster, K. 1999, 'Homework: a bridge too far?' Australian Association for-Research in Education (AARE) and the New Zealand Association for Research in Education (NZARE) Joint Conference 1999, Melbourne, pp. 13. <: http://www.aare.edu.au/99pap/for99405.htm> Hallam, S., 2009, Parents’ Perspectives in Homework: United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, in Deslandes R. 2009 Ed International Perspectives on Student Outcomes and Homework: Family-school-community partnerships Oxon & New York, Routledge , 47 -59. Hutchison, K. 2007 Rethinking Homework in Contemporary Australia: A Feminist Sociocultural Analysis. Unpublished Ph D Thesis, Deakin University. Hutchison, K. 2011, ‘Homework through the Eyes of Children: what does visual ethnography invite us to see?’, European Educational Research Journal, 10 (4), 545-558. Jeynes, W. H. 2003, ‘The effects of parental involvement on minority children’s academic achievement’, Education and Urban Society, 35, 202-218. Jeynes, W. H. 2007 ‘The relationship between parental involvement and urban school student academic achievement’, Education and Urban Society, 42, 82-110. Kryger, N. & Ravn, B. 2009 ‘Homework in Denmark: What Kind of Links between Family and School?’ in International Perspectives on student outcomes and homework: family-school-community partnerships, Routledge, Abingdon & New York, 7-24. Miller, J., Kostogritz, A. & Gearon, M., (eds) 2009, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Classrooms: New Dilemmas for Teachers, Multilingual Matters, Bristol, New York & Toronto. Patall, E. A., Cooper, H. & Civey Robinson, J., 2008 Parent Involvement in Homework: A Research Synthesis, Review of Educational Research, 78 (4), 1039-1101. Weston, P. , 1999, Homework: Learning from Practice, Office for Standards in Education, London.