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“It’s Hard. I Love It, and It’s Hard!”: Homeschool Moms’ Navigation of Academic and Non-Academic Life

Background

The extant literature on home education often focuses on the outcomes of the home educated student or the reason why families chose home education, but little is focused on the person of the home educating parent. In this dissertation, Gina Reynolds explores the person of the home educating mother, drawing out data to reveal the impacts and influences on this growing, but still under-researched population. Along the way, some unexpected data points emerge as she used intentional and emergent metaphors to elicit robust responses to this qualitative inductive inquiry. Finally, she makes draws some practical conclusion about home educating mothers and makes a practical application for home education support organizations.  

Methodology

Reynolds used purposive and snowball recruiting techniques, to obtain a final participant pool of 26 home educating mothers. These participants were broken up into nine online discussion groups, ranging in size from two to four participants each where the following research questions were explored: 

• (RQ1) What are the non-academic parts of life that the homeschool mom seeks to navigate while homeschooling?
• (RQ2) in what ways do these non-academic parts of life either enhance or interfere with your role as teacher?
• (RQ3) in what ways do these moms attempt to balance the parts of their life with their role as teacher?
• (RQ4) what impact does their balance or lack of balancing the parts of their lives have on themselves and their family’s well-being?

A unique aspect of this study was the use of metaphors to evoke rich descriptions of participants’ lived experiences. The researcher prompted participants with statements such as: Trying to navigate all the things in my life while homeschooling is like _____. This had the intended effect of sparking more robust conversations which may have otherwise only yielded nominal responses, but the extent of this effect even surprised the researcher.

Continue here for the complete summary of the study. 

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Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.

President, National Home Education Research Institute (www.nheri.org)