Unschooling and the Self: A dialogical analysis of unschooling blogs in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

Unschooling is a form of home education in which free play, trust and autonomy are highly valued. Unschooling is also a countercultural movement that began in the United States in the 1970s. Applying dialogical theories about the development and exchange of ideas through dialogue, unschooling can be seen as an internally persuasive, centrifugal discourse that resists an authoritative, centripetal discourse that assumes children’s education happens at school. The researchers conducted a dialogical analysis of 19 unschooling blog posts that contained autodialogue among multiple voices within the Self, including I-as-unschooler, I-as-mother, I-as-countercultural, I-as-learner, and I-as-thought-leader. These I-positions interacted with inner-Others, such as public figures in the unschooling movement, other bloggers, children, mainstream adults, and the school system. There were clear tensions as the bloggers engaged in imagined dialogue with their critics. As an exploratory, qualitative study on an under-researched phenomenon, the study opens up questions for further research, including how values, beliefs, and identities play out in unschooling families in practice, and contributes unique insights into the ways unschooling bloggers dialogically author their social identities.