UNRAVELLING

I caught my falling leaf this morning. Something I do each Autumn. It’s messy, imperfect, blemished, I love it. An oak leaf. A seemingly simple item, a leaf, with which I choose to give meaning with the season. It’s a turning of a page, a feeling of adjustment, again and again, year after year, settling into a new rhythm of change. 

Everything has changed in recent years. The baselines of what I once knew shifted. Here we are, first generation Home Educators, none of which we planned. Here we are, taking a day at a time, week upon week, trying to hold with care the words a friend once shared with us, “take it a year at a time, that’s enough”. 

Mainstream school was what I knew. My job was to observe, assess, and provide intervention. Asking, “Could a child access learning? Were they ready to learn? What did I need to do to support their learning?” My training and clinical experience viewed learning delivered within a particular environment: school. Never did it present itself that learning could, and does happen in other ways. 

Children go to school to learn and therefore, without school, what, how, and when would they learn? An adult’s role is to teach, to impart information at particular ages and stages. Therefore, outside this known paradigm, without this teacher to pupil dynamic, what and how would a child learn?

To reconsider learning itself, the role the environment plays, the role choice of practices makes never occurred to me before, this was how it’s done. Yet in meeting my son where he was, I began to expand previously held perspectives. I discovered inferential versus situational learning, and why it mattered. I became interested in the concept of learning, what it is, how knowledge is transmitted, what environments are supportive and in what way, what role interactions between people and relationships have, how my experience in communication science fitted into this, how my lived and personal experiences fitted into this. Our accounts of learning seemed to me to have increasingly forgotten our relational nature as humans. A strong focus on instructive learning, people becoming lost in preference for content and deliverables, visible outcomes. 

I began to witness learning happening beyond school, it looked different, not wrong. It wasn’t linear, instead spiralled through information of interest, growing in depth over time. Learning wasn’t always visible, instead expressed in multiple dimensions and areas within the same activity. It occurred situationally, anywhere and all the time: at home, in group meet ups, up hills and in forests, on walks, on day trips, with family, friends, in museums, online, in person with facilitators, alone through self direction, all day learning was happening. The moment I realised I could trust in my ability to respond, learning became an act of curiosity, creativity and togetherness with my son. I no longer needed to lean on my previous status of ‘adult’ or ‘therapist’, to have all the answers, because walking alongside each other and discovering these things together taught me more than I once believed I knew.

To notice became the ingredient I valued most, a rediscovery that a learning moment was reciprocal, it required from me the courage and confidence to hold steady in quietness, to avoid the need to step in and direct.  To instead be in a given moment with my son, whatever that may be, and trust that responding to his interests and facilitating learning from this point, expanding his ideas and experiences was how learning could look. It didn’t negate curriculums, instructive teaching, or even workbooks, it instead gave them place and purpose in a timely way. The risk became the stepping outside of the norm, the seeing of things differently. 

Children go to school to be with other children, to socialise and learn how to be amongst peers, not doing so means children will not learn social skills.

A perspective that whilst the first and most commonly asked question by others without experience of home education, quickly unravelled. We were busier than ever, out amongst people, children, families and friends day after day. The same group of people each day, no, socialising regularly through the week, yes.

Group size differed, we could be with one family one day, and amongst a larger group the next. Coercion was not needed, if my son needed time to adjust to spaces and places, new people, we could offer that response in the moment and continue to try again the next time. We had choice, to return to a group that was enjoyable and met interests, or decide differently and find another to fit our week. Social interaction was never a concern of mine, it was growing and evolving across a diverse collection of individual and group based environments.

Time was a precious piece, as I noticed this process no longer required a timeline or expectation, and if on a particular occasion an interaction needed support or guidance, it could be offered, taken home, and discussed together with all the information in front of us to guide my son. ‘Social skills’ is the term given to the mechanics of interaction, and ‘socialisation’ given to the expression of those behaviours in relationship with others. The myriad of groups, clubs and learning environments home educating children can choose to attend offers a broad variety of opportunities for social interaction skills to be expressed and for socialisation to emerge alongside role models, mirroring of practices, and shared principles, yet I’m left asking myself, which skills in particular are we expecting, and how much is cultural expectation driving what we see? 

Children go to school to be cared for by others, to be away from their parents, told “You have to let them go sometime”. Without early separation how will a child learn to be independent? And to learn this earlier is better than later.

The dialogue around attachment, biological needs, the neuroscience of the parent-child relationship was my area of work. At this time Polyvagal Theory was relatively new to practice in the UK, and often overlooked for the more established Behaviourism. Discussing nervous system regulation, dysregulation and co-regulation were not commonplace. I wasn’t looking through the lens of encouraging self-regulation as early as possible, I was interested in co-regulation as the foundation and was swimming against a cultural tide. I couldn't unlearn or unsee what I had in my clinical practice, when I did differently and when I parented differently, it was never personal. I knew nervous system safety was the foundation of development, and that learning was a byproduct of regulation, and co-regulation in particular. “Regulation is communication” I would share in my work, yet what this was and how it expressed itself was a slowly accepted perspective. I believed my child would increase his distance from me, independence another byproduct of nervous system integration, community

and self identity. I believed my son would be attending groups independently when he was ready, not necessarily on the timescales society had set. And we would know as parents that he was ready because he would increase that distance himself, use a look back, anchors of safety, increase the time we were apart gradually. And he did. 

Work must be 9-5pm, my career depends on me staying in this position, I will lose my identity without being in work.

There’s validity in each of these thoughts, I don’t express them lightly, they’re a family’s survival, and I am not about to sit here and say it’s all possible and as women and families we can have it all, the job, the choice of education, the time to ourselves. I couldn’t. I had decisions to make, very difficult decisions, conversation after conversation together with my husband around how we would pay our bills, whether we needed to sell our home, how we cut back even further.

I once asked my good friend and home educator of two now adult children, what the biggest challenge of home educating was in her experience, and it’s one we have eventually shared, the loss of income. We live in a capitalistic culture, and with that brings ever growing expenses and costs of living, that to step beyond the cultural norm also brings with it a ground shattering adjustment to how the day to day looks, how money is earned, and whether midweek and weekend even exist anymore. Each day becomes a learning and living experience, and how we each choose to live those twenty-four hours, 7 days a week will differ.

It’s an area of home education that may be less discussed. I myself eventually found myself part-time work, I paused my clinical practice, and decided to focus my mental capacity on my son's education. I adore the place I now work, it’s amongst accepting, encouraging, inspiring women, who equally have a dream of their own which I support and follow in turn. To be part of a group of women who accept me and my difference has been the most healing experience, one in which I see shift work, flexible working hours, collaborative ways of working and earning as a hope for the future. The risk of leaving what most people do means approaching the vulnerability of failure, misunderstanding and comparison, and the greatest experience in identity and courage has been to continue to be amongst people, in any capacity that feels comfortable whilst holding the many plates we spin educating beyond school. 

I once saw my place in the world through these questions, these threads of thought. My training, experience up to that point, my own lived experiences, experience of school, viewed through the only version of learning I knew. Life gave us a different path to tread, asked us to respond to the child in front of us, and gradually those threads began to unravel. As another season shifts I look back on how far we’ve come, the worries are real, the difficult moments we got through, and to walk alongside each other is what continues to guide our way. Looking less outward and more inward, to what our little family needs and has to bring to the spaces and places we are part of. 

We will each live this home educating path differently, yet to have the option of choice as parents and children, and to come together in community with shared values and practice seems a progressive way forward. I continue to ask myself questions, to reconsider why I do what I do, what choice I have in any given moment, and whether my child has been given the opportunity to speak. Changing my mind, a risk I never knew I would be taking in life, the vulnerability, rejection, misunderstanding and isolation that comes with that. A risk to not only dare to change, but to step forward into a version of life that has no compass, no benchmark, no guarantees. 

Book I have enjoyed:

Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger

Slow Knowledge and the Unhurried Child: Time for Slow Pedagogies in Early Childhood Education by Alison Clark

The Pocket Guide To Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe by Professor Stephen W Porgues

The Gardener And The Carpenter by Alison Gopnik

Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Mate

Blog post written for and published by Streams Education. For more information see https://streams.education/unravelling/