Situated Adult Learning: The Home Education Neighbourhood Group

Many families who home educate turn to a neighbourhood home education group for support, resources and guidance. The purpose of this paper is to first outline briefly the context of home education in the UK and US, to analyse three different types of home education neighbourhood group as communities of practice and then to theorise how these parents learn some of what it is to be home educators through participation in such groups as members. The analysis is based on evidence from long-term home educating parents collected through thirty-four in-depth interviews and the Community of Practice framework (Wenger, 1998).It will be argued that although communities of practice have variable features depending on the type of neighbourhood home education group a parent joins, they all engage in a form of collective situated life learning which helps transform parents to the point where they become ‘home educators’.