How do we think and talk about education for our children?
Guest blog by Bea Stevenson
Reflections from a research student on society’s cultural assumptions about education.
Experiencing my own children’s learning in lockdown threw all my preconceptions about education out the window. A trained primary school teacher, I had worked for years in mainstream schooling, working to an understanding that all learning needed to be planned for, tracked and assessed to targets according to specific ages and stages. The global pandemic forced my family into an unprecedented world of housebound companionship, and, over time, I began to look differently at how my children were engaging with the world around them.
‘It was so different…he was so calm and more able to play…. At school there was no time to unwind and process and manage the dynamics …We’ve seen her flourish with more time and space…to pursue the things she enjoys…. This lockdown has clinched the decision for us to home educate our 6-, 4- and 2-year-old’.
This excerpt is taken from an audio journal that I made through the two covid lockdowns between March 2020 and March 2022, which tracks the journey of the challenges to my own attitudes and beliefs about education and my role as a parent. When adult expectations and pressure were put to one side, my 6-year-old began to pick up books, and to read them. My 4-year-old began experimenting with creating shapes and counting them of her own accord. Without pressure I began to rethink what my own children needed to thrive, and to learn about the world.
As an ex-teacher, my assumptions about how to motivate a child to learn and progress were thrown into sharp question, driving my motivation to reflect more deeply on home education and the opportunity it presented to think differently about education. I began to question the discourses around school and education, the language that we use to describe children and families experience of education: ‘school-aged children’, ‘year groups’ ‘parent engagement’. I also became interested in how the decision to home educate our own children was challenged by family and friends as well as other parents, viewed as eccentric at best and detrimental to our children’s welfare at worst.
My doctoral studies are interrogating these narratives about home, school and education, asking questions about the ways in which schooling is made synonymous with education, and how home education is ‘othered’ in this context. It looks to examine assumptions that are made about home educators in policy and through parental discourse, as well as looking at the perspectives of those parents who choose to educate differently.
If you are interested in getting involved in an online focus group for home educators to explore these themes further, please do get in touch at the email address below, I’d love to hear from you.
Or use this Doodle poll to let me know when you are free. Link HERE
Bea Stevenson