This paper explores the co-existence of and relationship between, alternative education in the form of home education and mainstream schooling. Home education is conceptually subordinate to schooling relying on schooling for its status as alternative but also being tied to schooling through the dominant discourse that forms our understandings of education. Practitioners and other defenders frequently justify home education by running an implicit or explicit comparison with school; a comparison which expresses the desire to do 'better' than school whilst simultaneously encompassing the desire to do things differently. These twin aims however are not easy to reconcile, meaning that the challenge to schooling and the submission to norms and beliefs that underlie schooling are frequently inseparable. This paper explores the trajectories of 'better than' and 'different to' school as representing ideas of utopia and heterotopia respectively. In particular I consider Foucault's notion of the heterotopia as a means of approaching the relationship between school and other forms of education. Whilst it will be argued that, according to Derrida's ideas of discursive deconstruction, alternative education has to be expressed through (and is therefore limited by) the dominant educational discourse, it will also be suggested that employing the idea of the heterotopia is a strategy which can help us explore the alternative in education.
This paper reflects on the question of whether, and how, Fundamental British Values (FBVs) may affect the practice of home education in the UK. Fundamental British Values were introduced into the national curriculum in 2014, for state administered schools and preschools which have since been required to demonstrate that FBVs are embedded in the practice of the setting. Home educators, on the other hand, are not obliged to follow the national curriculum meaning that the effect of FBVs on such alternative education is not obvious. However, this paper draws attention to the wider environment of home education by considering FBVs as the product of three particular spheres of contemporary discourse as they interrelate and influence each other. These are the affordances of identity in a postinternational era, expressions of Foucauldian governmentality in terms of self-surveillance and management, and the developmental paradigm. Fundamental British Values, alongside the concept of parenting and the materialization of a particular social morality, are considered as the inescapably emergent products of the un/reason created by the overlapping of these discourses. Their convergence, in turn, creates a weight of logic from which FBVs exert influence over the practice and judgment of alternative forms of education.
Following the implementation of the Prevent strategy in the United Kingdom and the public linking of Muslim home education with radicalization, this research explores the perspectives of Muslim home educators. Using the concept of moral panics, this paper synthesizes work on Muslim identity with that of folk devil reactions to stigmatization. Data are drawn from three case study families via questionnaires and interviews and analyzed thematically within a symbolic interactionist framework, using an adaptation of Griffiths “folk devil reaction model” as an interpretative guide. Following an exploration of participants’ reflective self-appraisals, two categories of response are identified: retreat and resistance. Both of these are further subdivided, respectively, into reactions of blending in and withdrawing and reactions of drawing on resources and contestation. The paper argues that a legal and increasingly popular educational choice has been co-opted from being an individual family decision into a political narrative of danger, radicalization, and security implications. In a climate where prejudice about home education and Islam already abundantly exist, such a narrative may contribute to an increasingly intolerant society. Recognition of the situation of Muslim home educators may go some way toward tempering this.
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