THE JOURNEYS OF SIX MOM PEDAGOGUES: ENACTING PERSONAL CONVICTIONS AND DISRUPTING THE STATUS QUO

Home education or “homeschooling” began to re-emerge in the late 1960’s in the US, parallel to civil rights initiatives and shifting educational policies (Murphy, 2014). Nevertheless, few studies have been dedicated to examining the lives and practices of homeschool parents (Goldberg, 2021; Lois, 2006; Ray, 2021). Rather, topics have centered on homeschool demographics, academic outcomes, and challenges (Hauseman, 2011; Isenberg, 2007; Lines, 2000; Shepherd, 2010). The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the lived experiences of six homeschool mothers’ everyday lives and the meanings assigned to their pedagogical decisions and related feelings in their journeys of becoming Mom Pedagogues. The study took place in a metropolitan area in the southeastern region of the US. Six mothers, who were members of a single home school group, were recruited through snowball sampling and were all female, white and middle class. The study took place across nine months, including 39 weekly home visits and final, in-depth interviews. Data sources included field notes, audio recordings, and photographs taken by participants. At each visit, seminal moments of the week were represented and mediated through mothers’ photographs, representing current experiences, and recalling and memories of their childhoods in traditional school settings. Key tenets of Bioecological and Sociocultural Theories were drawn upon to illuminate how the mothers viewed their roles and enacted their evolving identities. Selected frameworks included Women’s Ways of Knowing, Ethic of Care, and Foucault’s analysis of power and discipline. These contributed to understanding how the mothers developed their personal epistemological beliefs and processes of coming to know, linked to their present-day concerns and life histories. Three findings emerged that include (a) the identification of turning points in participants’ lives that led to homeschooling, (b) the role of desire, ethic of care, and need to ensure emancipatory learning experiences for their children, and (c) the identification of convictions to ensure learning experiences drew upon their children’s needs, everyday lives, interests and a tolerance for an uncertainty they were making the right decisions for their children. Findings illustrate the ways in which the mothers aimed to fill their lives with direction and meaning in accordance with their lifelong values and beliefs, taking advantage of everyday experiences imbued with their children’s decisions and desires to enact and pursue meaningful learning. Implications for future research includes the need to value participants’ reflections from their childhoods to motherhoods, as they navigated their mothering and pedagogical roles in their efforts to disrupt the status quo of formal educational for their children

Information Practices of Administrators for Controlling Information in an Online Community of New Mothers in Rural America

Rarely does any empirical investigation show how administrators routinely control information in online communities and alleviate misinformation, hate speech, and information overload supported by profit-driven algorithms. Thematic analysis of in-depth phone interviews with members and administrators of a “Vaginal Birth After Cesarean” (VBAC) group with over 500 new mothers on Facebook shows that the administrators make 19 choices for recurring, authoritative but evolving 19 information-related activities when (a) forming the VBAC group over Facebook for local new mothers, (b) actively recruiting women who had a VBAC or have related competencies, (c) removing doctors and solicitors from the group, (d) setting up and revising guidelines for interactions in the group, (e) maintaining the focus of the group, (f) initiating distinct threads of conversations on the group, (g) tagging experts during conversations in the group, and (h) correcting misinformation. Thirty-eight information practices of the administrators indicate their nine gatekeeping roles, seven of these roles help administrators alleviate misinformation, hate speech, and information overload. Findings also show that the management of members and their interactions is a prerequisite to controlling information in online communities. Prescriptions to social networking companies and guidelines for administrators of online communities are discussed at the end

Consequences of information exchanges of vulnerable women on Facebook: An information grounds study informing value co-creation and ICT4D research

Information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) research sporadically leverages information science scholarship. Our qualitative study employs the “information grounds” (IG) lens to investigate the consequences of information exchanges by pregnant women on Facebook, who are vulnerable in the doctor-centric birth culture in rural America. The thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with members and administrators of the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) group shows that positive consequences outweigh negative consequences of information exchanges and lead to the following progression of outcomes: (1) VBAC group as an information ground, (2) social capital (e.g., cognitive, structural, and relational capital) built on the information ground, (3) seven emergent properties of the information ground, and (4) value co-created (e.g., local, affordable, timely, enduring, and reliable support) by VBAC group members. The IG lens reveals the following roles of Facebook, an ICT, in development: (a) a linker that lets people with similar needs and interests convene and shapes their interactions, (b) a pre-requisite to building an online, “third place” for social interactions, and (c) an apparatus for ubiquitously seeking, searching, sharing, and storing information in multiple formats and controlling its flow on the VBAC group. This paper fills in six gaps in the ICT4D research