A Study On The Ethnography Of Family Education Associations

In the beginning, as a de-schooling educational practical form, homeschooling originated in the sixties or seventies of the 20th century in the United States of America initially. After more than half a century, through a prolong process of legalization, it became an alternative education choice out of the state’s public educational system. As an ex-institutional form of education in China, its germination and development has attracted increasing attention from all aspects of society. In the current homeschooling educational practice of China, a new trend has emerged-several families jointed to educate their kids together. The focus-concerned object of this study, W Academy, surely is a typical case of homeschooling association.Using educational ethnography records in method, firstly, from its distinguished spatial-temporal lay-out, I described detailed its four-years’development process of scratch and frequent teaching-space changes, thus showing a plane figure of "the origin of W Academy ". Then, using interview and questionnaire as researching tools to collect information of the active main groups in this field-the teachers and parents, in order to make readers have a more stereo understanding to W Academy, I analyzed in focus their educational practices and ideas and roles. Next, I rendered the daily general activities and crisis event of the current W Academy, including its orderly specification of time-arrangements and its particularity on selection and arrangement of courses resources based on their specific philosophy of education within which homeschooling educators practice currently. And from the perspective of family-school communication, I analyzed the main features of its daily interaction:bidirectional process, equality between subjects, immediate and diachronic effects and the sincerity in the communicational contexts. In the end, I tried to discuss the principal problems of this study. On the one hand, in its homeschooling educational practice, W Academy remained the attitude of resistance to the national public educational system-pulling out all stops to escape the restrains and controls of the "hidden curriculums". On the other hand, however, it was interfered with the spatial-temporal distribution by the public education. Surviving in the cracks, these homeschoolers insisted to hold on their standpoint of education out of the state education system and strived to put it into practice actually.All in all, adopting the method of ethnographic research, this study had took a thick-description of the educational concepts and practices of the current homeschooling associated families in some urban areas of China, so as to make a detailed inquiry of how to balance the contradictions between faith-based educational feasibility and realistic helpless plight, then to sought a profound reconsideration of limitations of institutional educational system and posibilities of ex-institutional educational system.