Centering the Lived Experiences of Rural Black Homeschool Families

Academy for Educational Studies. 2419 Berkeley Street, Springfield, MO 65804. Tel: 417-299-1560; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://academyforeducationalstudies.org

Y

21

Rural Areas; Home Schooling; African Americans; Mothers; Parent Role; Race; Decision Making; Geographic Isolation

Alabama; Arkansas; California; Georgia; Louisiana; Tennessee; Texas; North Carolina

Compared to all other options, homeschooling provides parents with the most control over their children's educational experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in the U.S. homeschool population. Black families had the largest increase in home educators from 3.3% to 16.1% between April 2020 and October 2020. The emerging literature on Black home education has focused almost entirely on urban areas. This paper presents findings from a pilot study designed to begin to address the omission of rural setting representation in Black home education research literature. This qualitative study employed conceptual frameworks that value Black women's ways of knowing (e.g., Black Feminist Theory, Endarkened Feminist Epistemologies, and Critical Race Theory) to emphasize the role of participating mothers who represented a single-parent household or a household where the mother maintained primary responsibility for the home education of children.

As Provided

2024

EJ1435460