The shifting landscape of the homeschooling continuum

ABSTRACT

In 1988, Van Galen proposed two distinct categories to describe homeschooling parents – ideologues and pedagogues. Her model has been widely cited in the homeschooling literature. In the 30 years since the introduction of these identifiers, homeschooling in the United States has experienced tremendous growth due to a number of intersecting contextual and societal events, which suggests a need to re-examine Van Galen’s initial binary categories. Education reform, enacted through standards-based curriculum and assessment, school choice presented as a mechanism to improve the educational experiences of the country’s most vulnerable students, greater acceptance of homeschooling as a legitimate school choice, and the diversification of families choosing homeschooling as an alternative to traditional forms of K–12 schooling have all contributed to homeschooling’s explosive growth and a corresponding need to revisit homeschooling’s conceptual framework. This article proposes an enhanced framework for defining homeschooling, which better reflects the what of school and how of schooling that contemporary homeschooling families employ.

KEYWORDS:

• Homeschooling
• informal education
• gifted education
• framework

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Offered by such entities as the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford’s GiftedandTalented.com and the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University.