Disentangling the 'enigmatic mass' of home education discourse : a Foucault influenced analysis

This research investigates how knowledge about home education, the term most commonly used to describe children who are educated based at home as opposed to school, is formed and shaped through discourse. The study was conducted in the years immediately following the global COVID-19 pandemic, a period that significantly disrupted societal norms. Among these norms, regular school attendance was one of the most widely suspended or altered. This disruption created an opportunity to reconsider taken-for-granted knowledge about education, the home environment, and the role that school plays in English culture. A sample of policy and parental discourse about home education is examined through a framework informed by both social constructionism and Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The archaeological approach provides the study with the methodology and tools to illustrate the contingent ways in which the phenomenon is understood, as well as the conditions of possibility in which it has come to exist. I based the analysis of discourse on an adapted framework from Kendall and Wickham (1999) and Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine (2008). A three-stage process was applied to six policy documents, two focus groups with home-educating and school-based parents, and two interviews with home-educating parents. This process examined the statements that construct and position home education in several ways. The findings make three key contributions to current understanding of home education. First, that home education is constructed through both policy and parent discourse in ways that are binary and polarising. Second, the conditions of possibility for its existence – namely, the constructions of education, home and school - are more nuanced, with greater shared values and overlaps than the binary positioning of home education suggests. Finally, that the policy construction of home education positions the phenomenon predominantly as a threat. These findings, relating to polarisation, nuance, and regulation, gained discursive prominence in the years directly following the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Author dc:creator

• Stevenson, Bea

Contributors dc:contributor

• Wild, Mary
• Paule, Michele

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/wqc8-4760

OAI identifier oai:identifier

tle:d7b87dea-d5e5-49f4-93cc-06b4014ff932:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1