Blurring the lines: teaching literacies in home/school spaces

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Courtney Adams Wooten (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Kelly Ritter

Abstract: Films, popular media, and even literacy scholars (see Heath, Finders, Gere, and Gee) persistently portray teachers in classrooms. My project draws attention to teachers who educate in spaces that are simultaneously home and school: homeschooling parents who teach their own children, a group largely ignored in rhetoric and composition scholarship. Homeschooling offers parents a degree of instructional control that permits them to organize language instruction around key values, such as religious or moral beliefs. However, many homeschooling parents are also pressured to recognize the limits of their control as they anticipate a point at which students will experience writing instruction outside the home. Because they are non-specialists preparing their children for the specialized writing instruction they will receive in college, homeschooling parents engage in an imaginative construction of college writing and also reorder their teaching practices toward this future end. They control instruction and create these projections in different ways - most often through writing curricula, group writing courses, and discussions with other homeschoolers. I examine how homeschooling parents negotiate literacies in spaces that are simultaneously home and school to propose that writing instructors can better teach writing if they acknowledge the many types of literacies and expectations for these that teachers and students bring with them to the classroom.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2014
Keywords
Cooperative, Curriculum, Homeschool, Online discourse, Writing Instruction, Writing teacher
Subjects
Home schooling
English language $x Study and teaching
English language $x Rhetoric $x Study and teaching

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