Getting Started with Homeschooling
Practical Considerations for Parents of School-Aged Children
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
Networking
(continued)
Initially, making connections with other home schoolers is important for obtaining information about how other families educate their children at home; what problems and ideas they have encountered, and for moral support during the ‘registration’ process. Your children will appreciate meeting other children learning at home. Once the excitement and anxiety of beginning to home school settles down, however, you will need to establish regular contact with a few or more home schooling families. Even if you already have strong social networks, getting together with other home schooling families is vital to maintaining your confidence as your children’s principal educator.
Such gatherings, of two or more home schooling families, may focus on broadening the educational experiences of the children, give them an opportunity for playing together, offer the parents time for discussion on educational issues, exchange ideas, or just time for a chat and a cup of coffee.
The benefits of networking are many. As well as reducing the effects of feeling isolated, they include:
- a greater pool of resources and skills you can draw on,
- access to a variety of age ranges and types of people for social development (for you as well as your children!),
- group activities, both educational and social,
- improved ability to access community resources, sometimes at reduced cost, group concessions,
- support from each other to inform the community about home schooling, thus increasing opportunities for improved access to resources and social contact. Sometimes support networks can be difficult to establish. Some of the most often quoted reasons are as follows:
- a strong desire for privacy by some home schooling families,
- some home schooling families adhere to educational philosophies that places low emphasis on social contact, or on contact only with families sharing similar philosophies,
- a lack of time or energy to put into establishing and maintaining friends or contacts, particularly when only one person is regularly responsible for maintaining the network,
- distance between families, in terms of cost and travelling time,
- need for secrecy due to fear of authorities,
- lack of information about existing support networks,
- fear of becoming institutionalised, of losing individual family identity,
- and differences between educational or philosophical approaches.
Networks can be either formal or informal. A formal network may exist at the state level and connect families via a newsletter, regular gatherings such as camps or conferences, organise distribution of information relevant to home schooling, and also keep families informed of legal developments. Informal networks are usually more locally and community based, where a few families, often already known to each other, offer support and activities to supplement their own individual family learning programs. This is different from normal social activity in that it deliberately focuses on the educational needs as well as social needs of the families.
Informal networks tend to be small, with more frequent personal contact between members, more spontaneous activities and less formally organised ones. The activities reflect the members’ needs. In contrast, formal networks often organise activities which also reflect the need of the network to remain a useful and effective organisation for their members.
Informal networks become more formal once they establish contact between members via newsletters or telephone ‘trees’, and begin to advertise their activities publicly to attract other home schooling families in the local community, or to begin to actively promote this form of alternative education.
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Excerpt from Getting Started with Homeschooling, Practical Considerations
© Beverley Paine, 1997
